FORESTRY’S ADVOCATE:

WILLIAM D. HAGENSTEIN

Oral history interviews conducted by:

Elwood R. Maunder and George T. Morgan (July 1960)

Harold K. Steen (October 1992)

Forest History Society Durham, North Carolina

1995

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... iv Early Experiences ...... 1 Education at the University of Washington ...... 5 After Graduation ...... 11 Graduate School at Duke ...... 15 Starting at the Association ...... 21 The Farm System ...... 26 Research ...... 32 Supply ...... 33 Industrial Forestry Association ...... 40 Copeland Report ...... 41 New Deal Code ...... 46 Colonel Greeley ...... 53 C. A. Schenck ...... 56 Wilderness ...... 57 Regulation Controversy ...... 64 Early Years ...... 65 Timber Resources Review ...... 70 Multiple Use Act ...... 73 Northwest Forest Pest Action Council ...... 75 Wilderness ...... 81 SAF Presidency ...... 86 Executive Vice President, WLLA ...... 87 Back to SAF Presidency ...... 89 SAF Finances ...... 92 Wild Acres Controversy ...... 96 Madrid Forestry Congress ...... 98 National Timber Supply Act ...... 101 Wild and Scenic Rivers ...... 106 The Forest Service and Research ...... 108 Forestry Schools ...... 109 Industrial Forestry Association ...... 113 Congressional Testimony ...... 120

ii National Environmental Policy Act ...... 125 Earth Day ...... 128 Monongahela ...... 130 Resources Planning Act ...... 135 National Act ...... 137 Timber Sale Bailouts ...... 140 Tropical ...... 142 Log Exports ...... 146 Meeting the Presidents ...... 153 Industry Moves South ...... 154 A Job at GP ...... 159 Land Withdrawals ...... 160 Clemons ...... 165 The Forest Story Changes ...... 166 High Yield Forestry ...... 169 Selling Timber Land ...... 172 Capital Gains ...... 176 Timber Sale Bailouts ...... 179 New Forestry ...... 180 Meeting Gifford Pinchot ...... 186 Reorganization ...... 188 Forest Practice Acts and Regulation ...... 192 Endangered Species and Biodiversity ...... 194 Looking Back at Regrets ...... 198 Looking Back at Successes ...... 201

iii Introduction

Few of us reach such a level of prominence that we are recommended for an oral history. Fewer yet are prominent enough at mid-career to merit an interview, and then retain enough prominence for a second round thirty-two years later. But all who know him agree that William David Hagenstein is a rare individual ("they threw away the god damn mold after they made him"), and the Forest History Society is pleased to have had the opportunity to interview Bill first in 1960 and then again in 1992.

The 1960 interview took place in Bill's Industrial Forestry Association office in Portland. Elwood R. Maunder conducted it, one of nearly two hundred interviews he would log during his long tenure as executive director of the Forest History Society. He was assisted by George T. Morgan, a research associate. Morgan had written a biography of William B. Greeley, a person writ large in both interviews, and his participation is a logical one. The 1992 interview was conducted at FHS headquarters in Durham by Maunder's successor, Harold K. "Pete" Steen. Bill was en route from Portland to Richmond, Virginia, to attend the Society of American national convention, and he was able to schedule several days in Durham for the interview. The SAF, too, is part of Bill's story.

Inevitably there was some overlap between the two interviews, and to his credit Bill told the story the same way the second time around. In the edited version that follows, the major repeats have been deleted. However, some topics--like wilderness--show Bill looking ahead in 1960 but retrospectively in 1992. Such contrasts have been left intact. Overall, the transcripts were edited only for clarity to retain the conversational tone. Bill reviewed the text and corrected the occasional transcriber error. The 1992 interview begins on page 63.

Topics covered in the following pages include tree farms, forestry research, wilderness, multiple use, Society of American Foresters, Industrial Forestry Association, log exports, land withdrawals, and capital gains. On these and many other topics, Bill wrote contemporary opinion pieces, gave speeches, and testified to congressional committees. His vantage point was unique, and it is fortunate that he was able to commit his recollections to print.

Generous gifts from John Blackwell, Davidson Industries, N. B. Giustina, Alan Goudy, Perry Hagenstein, Ed Hayes, Jr., Dave James, Gene Knudson, Paul and Sally McCracken, John Mungus for Keep Oregon Green, Clarence Richen, L. L. Stewart, Henry T. Swigert, and William Swindells, Jr. supported this interview.

Harold K. Steen Durham, N.C.

iv (July 1960)

Elwood R. Maunder: Bill, briefly give us a capsule-like personal history. Your birth, education, background, and what led you up to forestry and ultimately of course, your association with Colonel Greeley.

William D. Hagenstein: Well, Elwood, I was born in Seattle, Washington on March 8, 1915. My great-grandfather Hagenstein came to the United States in 1836, settled first in New York State. It got too crowded there for him so he went to Wisconsin in 1840. My own grandfather, my father's father, was born in Wisconsin in 1848 which is pretty early in that state because I believe that was the year Wisconsin was admitted to the Union. Then the family went to Minnesota where my father and his brothers and sisters were born and ultimately migrated to the state of Washington.

ERM: Bill, was your family associated with the lumber industry back there in those days?

WDH: No, insofar as I know all of my people in the Wisconsin and Minnesota area were primarily farmers. But my grandfather did engage in in the state of Washington when he came, and one of my father's brothers worked as a logger in this region more than fifty years ago. My own father passed away when I was a boy of eleven and the very next year I started working summers in the logging camps, when I was twelve years of age. I'm rather reluctant to tell you that because it was illegal at the time in the state of Washington, because the state of Washington would be the first state to enact the law, I believe about 1921, making it illegal for boys under eighteen to work in arduous occupations such as logging, of course, was and is. But, at age twelve I was six feet tall and weighed one hundred and seventy-five pounds and had my full growth, my present height or almost my present height of six feet four inches when I was fifteen and weighed one hundred and ninety pounds. So from the time I was twelve until I was eighteen, officially I was eighteen all the time, the boy was out of britches for six years.

Early Experiences

WDH: I started working in logging camps, drawing the usual thing, first as a whistle punk, then as a choker setter, bucking wood for a wood-burning donkey, working logging railroad section crews, every boy had to have a crack at that, working as a chaser on the landing, working as braking slinger, and by the time I was twenty I held my first foreman job. And following the forestry education which I acquired at the University of Washington between 1934 and 1938, where I majored in logging engineering, I became a logging superintendent in 1939, one year out of college, a little bit less than one year out of college at age twenty-four.

ERM: Did you go back to work for the people that you'd worked for in the beginning, Bill?

1

WDH: No, I worked for a number of companies. I worked in thirty-eight different logging camps before I was twenty years of age, which was in the late '20s and early '30s. During the '30s of course the depression was on and work was scarce in places so a man had to travel around and look for it. In the '20s when there was lots of it there was a tendency for most of the loggers to be pretty nomadic. I was a typical transient logger in that I worked in one place for a month or six weeks or sometimes just for a payday and felt that I wanted to go someplace else so I did. Any kid that was willing to work had no trouble what-so-ever finding a job even during the depression. Except for the several trips that I made, as did a lot of western boys in the early '30s, to other parts of the country by freight train to look the country over, to look for work and to see the world in a way, I was always able to find logging employment during the depression years.

I also worked during part of that period as a fire fighter for the Forest Service. First in 1931 on the Coeur d'Alene National Forest in Idaho on the McGee fire. In those days you got a job fighting fire by going down to skidroad in the towns where they were hiring men, in this case Spokane, and there were always many more men than there were jobs. They gave you tickets, and being a tall fellow I could reach over the top of the crowd and always get one of the tickets. So whenever there was a job fighting fire to be had on the skidroad in Spokane, I could get one. Then of course I was a big skookum kid and willing to work and was always acceptable to the people who were looking for men to fight fire.

In 1934 I worked for the Forest Service again on a very bad fire in what was the Selway National Forest in northern Idaho. That forest was practically burned over completely during that fire and as a result they added the northern half of it to what is now the Clearwater National Forest and the southern half to what's now the Nez Perce. That fire burned more than two hundred thousand acres. It had an interesting name; it was the Pete King fire. There was an early day ranger whose name was Pete King, as I understand the story, after whom the ranger district was named and the fire originated in that district so hence it was named after it. That was the fire that I spent fifty days on and earned enough money, as foreman of a fifty-man crew at age nineteen, to pay for my first year of forestry education at the University of Washington.

Incidentally, that area is one of the areas which was partially burned over in the 1910 fire that Colonel Greeley had so much to do with when he was district (now called regional forester) for the Forest Service of the northern Rocky Mountain region in northern Idaho and Montana. The fires were a series of lightning caused fires in the Bitterroot Mountains. It was an extremely dry summer where the period without rain ran for eighty or ninety days before these fires started and the humidity got as low as 3 to 5 percent right along during the burning of the fires. Of course there was a continuous attempt to go in and build fire lines to try to contain the fire and then every day have to retreat because the fire would go over our lines. The thing kept spreading and getting larger and larger because the weather conditions continued to stay bad.

I remember one outstanding thing that occurred in that fire was that one night we were camped about five hundred men out at a place called Selway Falls about seven or eight miles above Selway Falls on Selway River. This area had largely burned over in the

2 1910 fire and it had beautiful twenty to twenty-five year old reproduction, mostly Douglas fir. The fire started at the bottom of the mountain. I stood at least seven miles away from it in this camp where we were in an old burn, that is an area that had been burned out by fire, because that was the only safe place in that area to have a camp. You go to bed for the six or eight hours we get out of twenty-four hours to rest, because we were working twelve or sixteen hours a day on that fire, sleeping bags sitting right on the ash. You think you're in a submersible because the weight of your body would take the sleeping bag right down below ash, you'd be spitting the ash out of your mouth, blowing it out of your nose; a little breeze would come along at night and blow the ash and you'd wake up with your mouth filled with the damn stuff.

When the fire started going in this young timber we were about seven miles away. It went up this ridge, up the slope to the top of the mountain then along this ridge for about, looked to be, five, six miles. We were seven miles away from it and you could feel the heat on your face, that's how intense that heat was. I never saw anything like it. The thing just exploded. All this young timber, of course, with all the resinous needles and bark, was just completely destroyed. I never found out the facts of it, but the story was that the lookout had been left up there and he didn't get off or if he did his lungs were so badly seared from the heat and smoke that he died thereafter. That's the rumor that we had on the fire, I never knew whether that really occurred or not, but of course there shouldn't have been any lookout up there. It was a mistake to ever leave a lookout up under those conditions.

Another interesting thing in that fire was later the next spring, spring of 1935. When the men went over it to find out exactly how much area had been burned, they found a couple of spot fires of tens of thousands of acres that we never had a man on because they had never been able to discover them. Because in a fire this size, there was over about 235,000 acres in this fire, the smoke pall lay in there just prohibiting any visibility which would allow anybody to observe where the heads of the fire really were. So all we were doing was fighting it on the side, really trying to go to the tail end of it and never really made it because we didn't get there. What finally took care of it of course was the fall rains and snow.

The morning that we came out we were about fourteen or fifteen miles back into Selway Falls, we came to the river and got there about two o'clock in the morning. Fifty days I'd been up in there, and there were a few men who had been there a little bit longer and of course a lot of them less, because they kept bringing in new men all the time from the skidroad of Spokane and other places. Local people, loggers, farmers, threshers, and what not around the countryside there. Of course they had in those days CCC camps and they had a lot of CCC boys up there. I had no bath during all that period so of course our bodies were filthy and lots of these men who were incapacitated in the fire were incapacitated because their feet would give out. Their boots would get all these ashes in them and irritate them and their feet would swell up and the balls of their feet would get sore. Some men to get away from the fire in different parts of that experience had to run across areas that were recently burned and they were still hot and they burned their feet. Corked shoes are very bad in that regard, each cork picks that old heat up and the heat is just transferred from the nail right up into your foot.

3 Everybody wanted to take a bath at two o'clock in the morning. We built blazing fires on the banks of this river and plunged into this ice cold water to clean our bodies, and I can tell you truthfully that was the best bath I ever had in my life. We didn't have any soap, we didn't have any hot water, but it was really a refreshing bath. Of course everybody had whiskers, no one had shaved. There were no facilities and all the water up high in the camps where we were fighting this fire was all packed in. So water was used for preparing the food and for drinking and for washing dishes and a minimum, mostly that which people surreptitiously took when someone wasn't looking, to use for such luxuries as bodily hygiene.

One good thing, the Forest Service was able to keep good supplies of clothing on hand. The one way I took care of my feet on this fire was something I had learned previously and it stood me in good because it kept me going. I bought a new pair of work socks every day, so every day I had a clean pair of socks, never washed any socks, didn't have any water to wash them so I threw the others away. I never had any trouble with my feet on the fire, although I did get the soles of my feet scorched running across the burn, one of these where we're getting away from the fire was taking over and we were trying to hold it.

Another thing of the fire that was bad, I think northern Idaho is the worst place in the world for yellow jackets and there's something about a forest fire that attracts them. Also they're attracted to the fire camps themselves because of the meat and the jam, and of course meat and jelly or jam are staples in a fire camp and lots of them. The cooks used to say up at this cam, when they were pounding steaks for example… Of course the kind of steaks we had had to be pounded, they weren't the kind you eat in fancy restaurants today at five to seven dollars a throw. They would always pound eight or ten yellow jackets into every steak. But we figured because of the acid that was in yellow jackets that they probably just flavored them a little bit just like some chef’s favorite secret.

ERM: Did they bother you as far as stinging is concerned?

WDH: Once when I was locating a line in advance of the timber fallers, I was in charge of the fire-line fallers on this fire, had twenty-five sets of sawyers, as they called them in the short-log country. They were falling timber, then they were coming through the beavertail men digging a fire line, and then backfiring of course, inside the line. I was locating line and there was another fellow with me. He got a little ahead of me and came back and said, "There are two big yellow jacket nests in this willow right up here." I said, "We've got to go through there so let's see what we can do." I had a coat with me though I didn't need one; I had it because you need it at night, it always gets cold in that mountain country early in the morning and you're sleeping on the ground. You carry it during the day and put it down and hope you remember to pick it up when you move on. I put this coat over my head and went in there and burned these nests out with lighted moss. Then when I came back I put my coat on for some reason, took it off my head and put it on.

A couple of yellow jackets had gotten out of the nests into the sleeve, they got on me and one of them got down inside. I had black wool underwear on, long underwear, that's

4 one way to keep the body clean. The yellow jacket came down inside my underwear. The yellow jack is different than the honey bee; he can sting more than once. You've got to kill him, he doesn't leave his stinger in you like a honey bee does, a honey bee will get you just once and leave his stinger in you, these damn things will go and go and go. So I kept slapping at him you know, going down and I finally got him right by my knee, but he got me five times before I got him. Of course they give you a shot of formic acid when they do and if your system reacts to it as most people do a little bit, you have a tendency to swell up there and its gets red and sometimes gets a little bit feverish. That was my only real bad experience with them there, but the stings hurt like hell, I saw lots of men who got stung around the face and it would close their eyes for example if they got stung on the eye lid or if they got stung underneath the eye, their flesh would puff up and completely close their eye. We had lots of them; they had to be taken off the line, taken down town for medical treatment because, well, you read all the time that people get killed by bee stings.

ERM: Right, especially when they're around the nose and eyes.

WDH: There's a limit of how much formic acid a human system can take, over a certain amount it's a lethal dose, that's what it amounts to. So these fellows who were really susceptible to it really got hit. Of course the old time loggers would kid these young fellows, we had lots of kids out there of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years of age. CCC boys were supposed to be eighteen but some of them were younger and then of course they picked up some of the local boys that were wise that were big skookum kids that were sixteen, seventeen but good fire fighters anyway. And the loggers kid these kids that got stung that the thing to do was make a poultice to get the hurt out. Well I suppose a mud poultice probably does help. They're eating dinner you see with gobs of mud on their eye, on their face, or on their neck or some place you know, trying to take care of the hurt of these damn stings.

Forestry Education at the University of Washington

WDH: That was a miserable fire. I lost about twenty pounds a week in that fire and when I came home from it I wanted to rest up a little bit and my mother asked me what I was going to do. I came home to Seattle, my mother's home. I told her that I'd met a quarter breed Yakima Indian over in this fire by the name of Blackie Morgan, who kind of had a lead on a pearl fishing outfit in the Gulf of Lower California. He and I were thinking of taking the money we'd made in the fire and going down and buying into that. My mother said, "Son you've been out of high school for almost four years," which I had, I got out of high school young. "You've been running around the country working in the woods, hoboing, and doing things that you've enjoyed and what not. Isn't it about time that you think about education with regard to improving your life?"

Right up to that point, during the period after I graduated from high school I hadn't even thought of college nor had I been interested in it. I really enjoyed working in the woods, associating with the kind of men that there were, a little different breed than you have in this day, hard, gruff talking, big hearted bunch of guys that did things. I was attracted to them very much so and, in effect, really became one of them. But Mother said, "You

5 better go and seek entrance to the university." University being, of course, in Seattle, just four miles from where I was born and raised.

I remember asking my mother if you didn't have to have some kind of credentials from high school. She said, "I've already taken care of that, they're all over there. They're on file in the registrar's office." I went over, Mother talked me into it, and they asked what I was interested in the registrar's office, I said, "I really don't know. What have you got?" Just like asking people in a restaurant what's on the menu when they don't have a printed menu. And she named off the principal subjects they had in the curriculum and she came down to Forestry, I stopped her there, and said, "Well, I've been working in the woods the last four years most of the time. That's about the only thing I know anything about, I kind of like it. I think I'd like to try forestry." And that's how I got into the forestry business, due to a determined mother who wanted her boy to amount to something, I guess, and who saw him being interested by working in the woods and perhaps not taking advantage or full advantage at least of his abilities. I think had I not gone to college I would have ended in the woods, probably as a logging superintendent. I had a natural bent in that regard, I liked working with the kind of men who worked in the woods, I liked the problems of logging, the equipment that was used in it, particularly in these days when it was all steam, steam was always fascinating equipment to me, still is, we don't have very much of it any more, perish the thought. With my forestry education I didn't lose interest in logging, by any means, but I got subjected to the great, wonderful thing of forestry--the replaceability of a raw material that is essential to mankind.

ERM: Bill, you went on to school then at the University of Washington College of Forestry.

WDH: That's right.

ERM: Now, while you were a student there, who among the faculty had the greatest influence on you as a young man?

WDH: The man, I think, that had the most influence on me, certainly in my beginning years there, was Dean Hugo Winkenwerder. Just by a strange coincidence, the Winkenwerders and the Hagensteins were neighbors in Wisconsin. I didn't know that until Dean Winkenwerder called me in shortly after I registered as a student for the first time in the College of Forestry. He asked if my people had come from Wisconsin and I told him they had. He told me that the Hagenstein family had been neighbors of theirs in this German community in southern Wisconsin where, today, I've been there just once, the names on the post boxes are all names as long and hard to pronounce as Winkenwerder and Hagenstein.

Dean Winkenwerder, who really was in the afternoon of his teaching career at the time I was a student, he retired about ten years after I entered college, had tremendous amount of influence on the development of in the state of Washington, a lot more than many people have given him credit for. The dean was a rather quiet, reserved man who kept busy building up his college, he was the second dean there, Frank Miller was the first dean. Winkenwerder came there as a professor under Miller two years after the

6 school was started and became the dean about 1910 or '11. He built it up to a front rank school; it was one of the outstanding forest schools in the United States. The reputation of its graduates was world wide because so many of them went into foreign work, for example. Being the institution in which logging engineering was started as a curriculum, when people became interested in developing the timber of far lands, that's where they came for logging engineering.

ERM: George Cornwall had a lot to do with getting the idea of forest engineering started at Washington?

WDH: Yes, with the initial meeting of the Pacific Logging Congress which was held on the University of Washington campus at the time of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909. George Cornwall, a fellow by the name Jim O'Hearne, who was at that time manager of the English Lumber Company of Skagit County, Washington, and Dean Winkenwerder were the three that really kind of put their heads together and decided that one of the proper functions of forest schools would be to train men to work in the mechanics, economics, and the engineering aspects of timber harvesting or logging. So they set out to develop a curriculum and they did.

The first man who ever taught logging engineering was E. T. Clark who was a graduate of Sheffield Scientific School of Yale and had his master’s degree in forestry from the Yale Forest School. He originally came west to be the deputy supervisor of the Snoqualmie National Forest at Seattle. Dean Winkenwerder and E. T. Clark jointly set up the curriculum of logging engineering at the University of Washington. First graduate of that curriculum, by the way, was Samuel A. Stamm, Ed Stamm's brother, who was a graduate civil engineer from Ohio Wesleyan or Ohio Northern, or one of those small denominational colleges that are very good in Ohio. He earned a master of science in forestry degree in logging engineering 1911. Mr. Stamm later lived in Eureka, California, but the historical interest I've got in him is that he's not only the first graduate of logging engineering in the United States, but many years after he was graduated I worked for him at the Merrill and Ring Lumber Company at Pysht, Washington, where I located the railroad that was used for harvesting the last old growth timber on that property.

We had some other very able men on the faculty there. One of the outstanding was a very young fellow; he was not very much older than the average of our class, if any. This was depression time and practically everybody was earning his own way through school, the average age of our class at graduation, for example, was twenty-eight years old, much older than the average in college classes since the G. I. Bill, since the economy has allowed lots of the parents to help their youngsters that few were able to do so in the early '30s. The prof wasn't very much older than we were. But he was a very engaging young man by the name of Elwood S. Harrar. He is now the dean of the School of Forestry at Duke University of which I'm also a graduate, by the way. Just a coincidence with the relation to mentioning his name. But Scotty Harrar, as we called him, his middle name was Scott, was an outstanding dendrologist and wood technologist from Syracuse. He had a bachelor's and a master's and a doctorate, all from the New York State College of Forestry, as it was called in those days. Never remember

7 what they call it anymore, it's got such a long fancy title that ends up at Syracuse University that you don't know how the hell to address the mail there.

Harrar was a guy who had the rare ability to enthuse students on the subject and he was a professor who really bore down on us and made us work.

He was so square, I remember very well one of my classmates, one who shall be unmentionable, whom if we'd ever had a vote in our class was the one least likely to succeed this would have been the boy, but the fact is, if material things count he's been the most successful because he's a millionaire today, as he said, "Well, Harrar flunked me, but I deserved it. That guy is so square that he'd flunk his own grandmother if she didn't cut the buck." This is the way he was. , the science of the , is a very important subject for foresters and it's always been amazing to me how many members of my own profession go into an area in which they do not live or reside or work and are almost hopeless when it comes to identifying trees. Whether they're lazy about it, whether they're not interested, or what, I don't know, but it seems to me that every forester should be a good dendrologist because if you don't know the trees you are dealing with, how the hell can you prescribe for them? You've got to know what their requirements are in the ways of soils and climate, you've got to know spacing when you're planting trees and young stems, you've got to know the need for light and moisture, and you don't know any of those things unless you know what the hell they are.

Harrar was from an excellent forest school. I would say that of all the schools, Syracuse was the best. Of course over the years now I've worked with foresters from many, many universities, in fact in our own staff here we have men from several--we have one man that is a graduate of Cornell, has a master's from Harvard, and a doctorate in genetics from California. We have one man who is a graduate of Iowa State College, we have one man who is a graduate of the University of Minnesota, we have one man who is a graduate of Oregon State College, and we have another man who is a graduate of Davis- Elkins College. He went there on a football scholarship but took a master's degree in forestry at the College of Forestry at the University of Washington. Three of the rest of us are University of Washington graduates, one of them, myself has a master's degree from Duke, so you see we're pretty well diversified, even in our own little outfit here, but of all the foresters I've worked with, all from different schools, twenty or thirty of them from throughout the country and some abroad, I've never met any who are better dendrologists than the group that studied the subject under Scotty Harrar. Of course as you know, he was the author of the principal textbook that has been used for the last twenty-five years in this country, called the Textbook of Dendrology, that was written jointly by Harrar and one of his classmates at Syracuse, Dr. W. M. Harlow.

Then we had in the middle of my schooling at the University of Washington, three bright fine young fellows come in as faculty members. Winkenwerder was always good on improvement of the faculty. As the school began to grow and they had to get new fellows, they went out and brought in bright new fellows. There was first Dr. Frederick Wangaard by name, who is now on the faculty of Yale School of Forestry. He was a University of Minnesota boy who did graduate work at Syracuse, and Dr. Gene Zumwalt who was also a classmate of mine as well as one of my professors, because he

8 took a master's degree in forestry at the University of Washington the year I was graduated with my bachelor's degree. He was a University of California graduate and has since taken a doctorate at Yale and for a number of years after the war was on the faculty of Yale but is now with the Bureau of Land Management in Anchorage, Alaska, a very fine able young management man. The third one was Dr. O. H. Schrader, Jr. Harry Schrader who was a University of Washington graduate who had taken his master's degree at the University of Wisconsin while working at the Forest Products Laboratory and finally took a doctorate in forest utilization at Yale. Then for a number of years following he taught me at the University of Washington in forest utilization and later was manager of the Douglas Fir Association and currently is the manager of the Washington operations of U.S. Plywood Corporation of Seattle.

All three of these young fellows were two or three years older than the average student in our class and all three of them were excellent instructors. They were all good lecturers, Schrader was the best, Schrader was the best lecturer I've ever heard in my life, to this day no man can beat organization and laying a thing out simply, concisely, interestingly like Harry Schrader. Many times when I've had occasion to refer back to my college notes, you could tell which were the best lecturers because they were the easiest to outline and Schrader's are just so logical in arrangement, he was the easiest man to take notes from that I ever listened to.

Then we had, of course, one of the outstanding forest products men in the country there, Bror L. Grondal, who was a graduate of a denominational institution in Bethany, Kansas, I think Bethany College by name, one of which I'm not personally familiar, and then was one of the early graduates from the University of Washington. He took a master of science in forestry degree there in the College of Forestry in 1913 and has been on the faculty, just retired last year after some forty years. I never had Grondal for a class, very strange just worked out they had these young fellows in there in the field of utilization and I drew all of them in my schedule.

I got very close with Grondal as a man because we had a publication at the University of Washington College of Forestry, which I'm sorry to say has disappeared now, it's no longer published, but it was called the University of Washington Forest Club Quarterly, which was started as an annual in 1911 and was published for ten years as that and in 1922 was started as a quarterly, published three times a year, the quarters being the academic quarters of the school year. This technical magazine was the only one ever published, only technical forestry publication ever put out regularly by any forest school in the United States. Some schools have bulletin series and some have annuals that are so much like high school annuals, that have a little bit of technical stuff in them but for the most part kind of rah-rah stuff. This was a good magazine. Grondal and I got well acquainted working together on this Forest Club Quarterly. The thing died in 1932 and a bunch of us thought it was a desirable thing to have for the College, for the Forest Club which was the sponsor of it, so we revived it in 1936. Jack Fay was the first editor of the revived magazine, and it was published continually then until about five or six years ago.

In 1937 and 1938 I was the editor of it for two years and Grondal was alumni representative, being an alumnus of the college. We didn't have very active alumni in

9 those days. We had one informally organized but it would have a meeting for ten minutes before the annual Forest Club banquet in some place and elect officers and they'd announce that at the Forest Club banquet. They never had any dues, they never had any publication, they never had anything. In the Forest Club Quarterly we published once a year an Alumni Directory, which was always of interest to people who were graduates of this institution. But for the most part it was directed at presenting forestry information in the way of technical articles and did a little editorial work.

I got into some beautiful controversies. Olympic National Park was one of the issues in the state of Washington at the time and of course we took that one up. We had a fellow by the name of Scott Gonsecki, one of my classmates, who was an excellent cartoonist. I used to write these somewhat controversial editorials, and he would illustrate them very well with a single cartoon that really would set them up. We used to get requests from all over the country to reprint this stuff because we were really trying to do a job. It would get the College a lot of notice and of course it didn't hurt the graduates from there, that was the idea of the thing. I think it's too bad that the students have sat on their big fat duffs up there and let the thing die because those who are older graduates of the College recognize what an important thing this magazine was for the alumni of that college.

ERM: And it dried up, Bill, just because the students don't take an interest, or has there been no money for it or has there been no alumni to support it?

WDH: It was theoretically a self-supporting thing. We all had a hard time making it pay. I don't think during my period that we were ever solvent. We sold advertising plus subscriptions at a dollar a year for three issues which was supposed to keep us self- supporting. Then after the Depression was over for a number of years there, during the war it was hard, there weren't very many students there, but after the war they had no trouble at all getting advertising as a result it continued. It gave another outlet for publication of technical material which was used in all the libraries for foresters' use throughout the country because we had a circulation list and free circulation to all the libraries of institutions of one sort or another that were interested in this sort of thing.

ERM: Did that lead into your editorial work for the ?

WDH: No, not necessarily, but it gave me a little background experience in that, I believe. It interested me certainly in that field. I was one of those fortunate youngsters who, I say fortunate because I had good English teachers in high school and I was enthusiastic about the subject. I was always a great reader and early in life, apparently, became relatively articulate so that reading, writing, and speaking; these three things had been forte in my life.

ERM: Do you think these three things have not developed very fully even yet in forestry school?

WDH: No, I think the average forestry school is deficient as of yet in doing the one thing that good technicians need, the ability to express what they know to the people for whom they work so they can guide their policies and help them improve their processes

10 and management of their lands and so forth. No matter how good a technician a man is, if he can't communicate what he knows to his people, he can't sell it. For everything we do is salesmanship, we've got to be able to merchandise our knowledge to the people who are going to make the decisions if we're going to make progress. In every field, not just in forestry, that's true in every field in life. That's one of the real weaknesses of our profession as yet and our schools are aware of it. You talk to the deans of any of the schools, you go to the Society of American Foresters meetings where they have the divisions of education which is made up of the men in the teaching end of our business and immediately they will admit that foresters are poor speakers and poor writers. Then they look at you and say, "Well, we can have courses in public speaking, we can have more English, special course in technical report writing," which some of the schools do have by the way, not all but some, "we'd have to either cut out something else or have a five-year curriculum leading to a bachelor's degree when the average boy doesn't want to go more than four years to attain a bachelor's degree.

ERM: Aren't we coming to that, though?

WDH: Well, maybe, I don't know. Not being an educator in a formal sense, I'm in education up to my heels in that we're trying to educate landowners for their opportunities in forestry and that's education certainly. I don't know because I'm not too close to the curriculum of the schools. I mean I read the catalogs from the University of Washington and Duke University which I get each year and see what they're offering. Of course for the last several years I've been serving on the Council of the Society of American Foresters and a number of the men on that council, five of them in fact out of the current council of eleven, are educators, either deans or professors. And naturally when we sit around our bull sessions after our formal council meeting education comes in for a lot of discussion. Of course I get in a few plugs once in a while for durable Douglas fir, but we talk more about educating foresters than we do about application of forestry and what not. Society problems, what we need to do to make our Society stronger, more dynamic organization in forest policy in United States, but don't get me off on that one.

ERM: We'll get you off on that one later on; I want you to do a purely chronological job right now, Bill. Where did you go after you left school, did anybody come in and recruit you for a job while you were in.

After Graduation

WDH: If you were graduated in 1938 from forest school no one was recruiting anybody for anything, or as we would say in those days, no one wanted anybody for nothin'.

ERM: I know, I graduated in 1939.

WDH: Well, you know what I'm talking about. The junior forester examination for the government of course, was not given that year. Up until that time during the '30s the principal opportunities for employment were in the federal government, mainly in the

11 Forest Service, largely because of the work the Emergency Conservation Work Program which embodied the CCC camps. As a matter of fact forest schools were out recruiting students on the slogan "Every forester gets a two thousand dollar a year job" which is what the prospects were if you could pass the junior forester examination or if you had political influence with the party in power, which shall be unnamed although we all know it was the Democratic party. To get a political appointment as a foreman in a CCC camp, of course, you didn't have to be a graduate forester to do that but if you were a graduate forester and couldn't qualify by the junior forester examination you could get a job on the political patronage list. I'm not criticizing anybody for that because a lot of very good foresters got their first experience with forestry that way and who made significant contributions to the building up of forestry in our country since, that's just a factor of the times.

Anyway there was nobody beating on our doors seeking to recruit us in the summer of 1938. There were fifty-one men graduated in our class out of the two hundred plus who entered in 1934. I suppose that's the normal mortality; probably a fourth or a little less than a fourth of those who entered were graduated. Of course some of the men who graduated with us were not men who entered with us because it was customary in these days, even in the '20s, for foresters to go to school a year and drop out a year, that sort of thing.

Fortunately I was able to go straight through because I was able to earn enough with my summer employment each year while I was in college to pay my way. Of course I had the advantage of living at home where my mother was most reasonable in board and room. I paid for it, but a much more nominal rate than I would have had I been living away from home. Expenses other than board and room were primarily tuition, books, and car fare getting to and from the university; it didn't take very much to go to college. My total cash outlay for going four years, 1934 to 1938 to the College of Forestry of the University of Washington, was less than two thousand dollars. When I got through and was graduated in June of 1938 I had ten dollars cash, a job to go to, and no debts. I was a hell of a lot better off than most of my classmates, many of whom had more than five hundred dollar debts hanging over their heads and many of them didn't have jobs in forestry. Mind you there were plenty of jobs available at Boeing Aircraft Company in Seattle, and foresters had enough engineering and drafting that they were in demand for the engineering department at Boeing. Many of them went there and some are still there, some of them are executives in that company now who started as engineering draftsmen along back in the late '30s.

I had a chance to go to work for the city of Seattle. I was unmarried and I went to work for Allen Thompson, the city forester, up in the Cedar River Watershed as fire warden at Walsh Lake, which is at the west end of the watershed. I had worked up there during college as a lookout in the summer of 1936. I was well acquainted with Thompson. He was willing to have me even though that was just a fire season job really, but that gave me bacon and beans while I was trying to figure out something else to do. I was only there a month however when an obscure civil service examination which I'd taken about two years previously called Field Aid Entomology, that was that title of the job.

12 It was a job that there were three or four options for, I guess one was in entomology or forest entomology, that's the one I took. I had two months experience working on a mountain pine beetle control project in Mount Rainier National Park in 1934 where we were the trees, peeling the bark, burning the bark to kill the brood of the beetles. On the basis of that and about three of four quarters of college I got a grade of seventy- two point zero on this unassembled examination. A month after I had graduated from college I was queried as to whether I would accept an appointment at the magnificent sum of one hundred and twenty dollars a month which was exactly five dollars a month more than I was making at the city of Seattle, and believe it or not, I succumbed to the temptation and went from King County, Washington, to Hat Creek in northern California on the to accept a probationary appointment as Field Aid (Entomology) SP3 at one hundred and twenty dollars a month with no expenses. You had to buy your own bacon and beans. Even though you were in travel status you had to pay for your own food. Of course I had to pay for my own food when I was batching at Walsh Lake for the city of Seattle too.

It was a good experience because I got acquainted with a very fine entomologist, Dr. Ralph C. Hall, who is still with that station at Berkeley, California, who had just been transferred out there from Columbus, Ohio, that year. Another Syracuse graduate in forestry and forest entomology with a doctorate from the University of Michigan, his class was Syracuse 1922 and he's affectionately called Ma Hall by his classmates. Hall had a wonderful family and he and I have been very good friends to this day. Ralph was first out that year and I was new and there was another fellow who was an untrained man and we worked on the pine beetle risk classification study. I'd had a summer's experience on this kind of thing in the Ochoco National Forest in Oregon in 1937 while I was still a student. I wasn't new in this thing, having had the experience of measuring three hundred and twenty acre sample plots that were measured annually to determine the losses from bark beetles, part of a regional study that they had both here in the Northwest and also in California that had been carried out for many years to keep track of the infestation, principally of the western pine beetle. An interesting job in that every day you'd be in a different area and the three of us living in a tent camped out.

Hall was a man who loved to fish and shoot birds, so we were well supplied with fresh fish right along, and when the bird season came around late in the fall we had ducks and geese. We worked on four national forests, on the Plumas National Forest, just a portion of it at the northern end of it, just adjacent to Susanville, California, and then all over the Lassen, the Shasta, and the Modoc national forests. So I got to see a great chunk of country there because we'd have an average of perhaps one of these sample plots in a township, so for the six months I was down on that job we had interesting experiences. Hall was a nice chap to work with and I learned a lot with him, it was really very good experience. But then when the snowballs came in late fall they hit us in the tail with a paycheck early enough so that our probationary appointment didn't become permanent and promised that we might be considered for employment in the next field season. Men, of course, can't live on promises, so I came back to the Northwest and went to work in the logging industry again.

I went to work for a company in Skagit County, Washington, Eagle Logging Company. The company is no longer in existence. It was a truck logging outfit, a relatively small

13 company; I went to work for them as logging engineer early in 1939. After a few months the superintendent was discharged, and I was made superintendent at age twenty-four and ran that outfit for the rest of that year. It was a two-side outfit, we had equipment for two sides but we ran on just a side and a half most of the time. It was steam equipment; we had wood-burning steam donkeys. We had an old Washington 12 by 14 two-speed which of course was one of the favorite donkeys of the steam loggers which we used as a yarder. We had an old Washington wide face, which could be used for a slackline machine because one drum was big enough to put the slackline on and use the 12 by 14 for a yarder. Then we had another Washington 12 by 17 Simplex which we alternated with the 12 by 14 as a yarder. We also had one D-8 Cat and a Hyster arch and used it to log up the slopes while we were logging the lower slopes with a yarder operating just a side and a half, which put in a million and a half to two million a month.

Logging most cedar timber on steep slopes where the breakage was very bad. This was in 1939, twenty-one years ago. We were selling our broken cedar and whatnot to a shingle mill that was salvaging it so we were relogging then. It wasn't an uncommon thing at all in the cedar country, although a lot of people in this region that don't have experience in cedar think that relogging is something that has started since the end of the war. The fact is that up in Skagit County where cedar obtains, its best development in the Douglas-fir region for years is where most of the shingle mills got their raw materials from relogging following commercial logging operations, going in and picking up the broken stuff and making shingle bolts out of it. Then I got into a little disagreement up there with the manager of the company partly over salary, so I left there and went to work as logging engineer for Merrill and Ring Lumber Company over at Pysht, Washington, where I earlier told you that I got acquainted with Sam Stamm, who was the first graduate of logging engineering not only at the University of Washington but the first man to get such a degree in the United States.

ERM: Did you get your job from him?

WDH: No, I was hired by a chap by the name of Doug Maver, one of my schoolmates. He was their logging engineer, on a part-time basis because they didn't have enough work to keep a man occupied fulltime. They were getting to the tail-end of this whole pioneer operation, and the logging engineer's job primarily was to lay out the railroad for logging and then the logging show itself. The shows had all been laid out so the only job with them actually was to lay out about two and a half miles of logging railroad, which was the last they ever needed to clean up their old growth timber and their merchantable second-growth. I was only there a short time, and then I got interested in doing some graduate work. I always kind of had a bee in my bonnet that I wanted to teach forestry because I had some attributes that at that tender age I thought I recognized as necessary for being a teacher. One was I was enthusiastic about the subject. Second was that I was articulate so that I could talk intelligently and it seems to me to keep people's attention. Third was that I recognized that our business was just beginning to get started in this country. We were going to have a tremendous number of men to train to really do the job of forestry that we were just getting on the threshold of. I could see even then that forestry was just opening up and beginning to come into flower, up until that time the bud had never opened. They did a lot of talking about

14 forestry in the United States but no one had done much about it. We were getting up to the point in our history where the demand for timber was going to exceed the current supply so that if we were going to satisfy it by discharging the obligation of the forest, we're going to have to grow timber. That meant of course men that were trained in the arts and sciences, in the arts and sciences for forestry's good.

ERM: Really opened the door to the profession.

WDH: It really did. For the first time it was possible to really practice forestry because its supply and demand had become an economic thing. Up until that time the curse of this country was that we had so damn much timber that it was a cheap commodity for three hundred years. Now that was good in that it helped build our country and all that, cheap timber was a wonderful thing for the development of the agricultural Middle West. Having those wonderful Lake States pineries right alongside all that fine agricultural land. There were people who described the terrible forest destruction in the Lakes States, but as Colonel Greeley says in his book, one of the really literary contributions he made in his book, Forests and Men, the Lakes States pineries are standing yet as the houses for the people and the houses for the animals that built the grain basket that the Middle West is. They represent the best-fed people on earth because without that lumber the people couldn't have endured it. They had to have lumber. The agricultural soil by itself wasn't enough; they had to have houses for the people and houses for the animals, that together built it, that's almost literary isn't it? I thought that was one of the real outstanding passages in his book.

Graduate School at Duke

WDH: I got interested in teaching and what-not, or thought I did, and I went and talked to some of my professors at the University of Washington, Dean Winkenwerder, Professor Grondal, and several of the others, Fred Wangaard. I applied to the New York State College at Syracuse for scholarships or fellowships; I'm not really sure what they were. I was interested in the field of dendrology and wood technology - I was always a shark in dendrology. It's still my hobby by the way. I collect leaves, fruit, bark, twigs every place I go until it drives everybody nuts when I'm with them because the car is filled up with stuff like that and there isn't any room for our gear. It gives us quite a problem at home for storage of a lot of things, I never throw anything away, I'm a goddamn pack rat you know, that's obvious. And you can't see all that's in here because these cases are built to hide all that stuff so the place looks a little neater. There isn't a cubic foot of empty space in here.

I have had the experience of collecting wood samples and herbarium material for Dr. H. P. Brown, who was the outstanding wood technologist in the country at the time, at Syracuse. I collected stuff in Oregon, Washington, and California for him where I used to go and get full leaves, flowers, and fruit of the tree to make sixteen standard herbarium sheets and then enough logs to make two hundred and forty standard wood technology blocks for specimens. One of the reasons I was doing this was because the University of Washington was one of the depositories for these herbarium materials and

15 whatnot and with some of their men participating in the wood collection for Syracuse it helped get the stuff for the University of Washington.

I had been doing that for a number of years so I'd had a lot of correspondence with Dr. Brown whose project this was. I thought I had kind of an in to get a scholarship. But I hit a bad year with him in that he had four outstanding men who had taken their undergraduate work under him who wanted to go on and take master's and some of their doctorates under him. He only had four scholarships available and so naturally he knew all of them and their record was in that field while mine was in logging engineering as an undergraduate. Their courses had been directed that way, and mine had been directed toward logging engineering and forest management rather than wood technology so he couldn't do anything for me. He was most apologetic, I've kept the correspondence; it was a very interesting letter, it's a real friendly letter from a man I never had the privilege of meeting. He's dead now but he was torn between this boy that had helped him so much in his project and with whom he'd had so much correspondence and exchanged many interesting letters but whom he'd never seen and these four boys that grew up right underneath his wing. So of course he made the only decision he could make in what he did.

I applied to Duke University also and checked very carefully by the way that it wasn't unethical to apply for scholarships at two places at the same time. When I determined that wasn't the case, I kind of had a question in mind as to whether there wasn't a bit of duplicity in applying for two scholarships at two different schools at the same time, but I was assured it wasn't and that people did that all the time so I did. I was helped there of course by the fact that Scotty Harrar was there as a professor of dendrology and wood technology under Dr. Korstian, who was the dean. Of course knowing Scotty very well because he'd been my professor of dendrology at the University of Washington. Scotty helped me get a scholarship there, I had one of these Duke Endowment Scholarships, which as I remember they were worth five hundred dollars and then all you did was sign it back to them because that's what the tuition was for a year. So you didn't get anything out of that really except, well, you did get five hundred dollars to pay your tuition without which I couldn't have done it because I didn't have very much money saved up. I had been working during periods of low pay certainly, and as the fellows said in those days the trees were bigger and the pay was smaller, now the trees are smaller and the pay is bigger, that's inflation.

I'd been interested in a young psychologist whom I met while in a University of Washington chemistry laboratory and had been paying court to her for several years and convinced her that two could live as cheaply as one if there was a scholarship involved. When I got the scholarship we decided to get married, so we did. I went and did my graduate work on my honeymoon really. I elected to work in the field of utilization, the eastern schools' term for anything that had to do with logging; in the west of course we have these two highly specialized curricula of logging engineering at the University of Washington and Oregon State College, but at other schools they don't have logging engineering curricula. They are apt to teach a bit of it in what they call utilization while to us out here utilization was wood technology, the chemistry of wood, timber mechanics and things like that. It didn't include logging but then of course we got that in logging engineering courses.

16

ERM: This was influenced principally by geography?

WDH: I think so, I think it was. You get a little bit different background because of the situation locally and what develops the pattern there from. I worked under Professor Albert E. Wackerman, who's the head of Forest Utilization at Duke University and made a logging cost study. It was a typical masters' thesis title, as long as hell. The title of mine is "An Investigation of Logging Costs and Efficiency of Typical Operations on the Eastern Piedmont of North Carolina." I got satisfaction out of my thesis because my thesis was one of those rare theses, that despite the title or the handicap of its title, it had been used. Shortly after it got into circulation through libraries and reference cards and whatnot, somebody in the Tennessee Valley Authority picked it up and sought permission to reproduce it, which they did. It's been a text for their utilization men for many years in aiding them in making comparisons between logging methods to see which one is the desirable one to use in a specific situation.

Basically I developed a technique for making a time and cost study with one man. I'll admit it was kind of tough and that sometimes I had three stop watches going all at the same time, and of course with only two hands I was a bit nonplused about how to use them, but I even learned how to take time using a stop watch in your mouth, they don't taste very good after they get dirty and sweaty but I was able to do it. So I just get this satisfaction out of having something that's been referred to many times in the literature and has been used practically by an agency to improve the efficiency of logging. When I went down there, during the academic year of 1940 and 1941, when I was making my study, all the logging in that part of North Carolina at least was done with animals. What I did was compare the conventional animal method with a small tractor to show the relative efficiency. Today you still find animals in the South just as you find a few of them here in young timber and all that, where they work out very well. For a lot of logging animals, with labor rates the way they are today, just became passé. You've got to have something that can do it more quickly because time is the thing you're fighting in costs.

ERM: Your thesis was picked up then and published by the TVA. Do you have any comment to make on this in regard to the TVA contribution to the development of better understanding of good logging methods in the South?

WDH: I've never personally had the opportunity to visit any of the areas which the Tennessee Valley Authority has been operating. Its forestry program has been going on for twenty years now or slightly longer. I knew a number of the men, the foresters who are employed in that organization, fellows like Dick Kilborn, who's the chief forester, and Weisehuegel, who's one of their economists, a fellow by the name of Olson, who was a Duke graduate that I met while I was down at Duke, Ken Seigworth, and several others. Recently I was on a program with John Lehman down in San Francisco just a couple of weeks ago with John Lehman as a matter of fact, before the Paper Industry Management Association. He delivered a paper on utilization. So I don't have the first hand knowledge. However I have been on their mailing list for years to get their literature and I read their reports and I've talked to their men at the Society of American Foresters meetings and other places. I've talked to industrial foresters in the area and

17 many people that the utilization program that the TVA people have put in approving practices both in logging and in have been beneficial to the economy in that area.

The idea of Tennessee Valley Authority, or any valley authority, is rather unacceptable to people of the Pacific Northwest. We have people suggesting a Columbia Valley Authority with three men to be the czars or the commissars to take over the whole economy based on the land and the rivers in the Columbia Basin. It's been a hot political issue from time to time. It's rather simmering now but opponents of it are just lying on the blower waiting until the time is right to come up with another final attack, I'm sure. Despite the antipathy of people generally in the Northwest to a Columbia Valley Authority and my own personal antipathy toward it, it's my impression that if you look at things in context that the TVA is in a highly rundown, eroded, backward section of our country, in the upper end particularly of the Tennessee Valley that a good job has been done trying to reclaim that land and reclaim the people by building up an economy. In that area I think it's probably worked pretty well. I don't think everything that TVA has done has been good, I think they've wasted a lot of money on some things like lots of well conceived projects do because of turnover in personnel, because of changing political complexions that first stride them off to the northeast and the first thing they know they've gone lickety-split southwest without picking up the pieces and naturally inefficiency results because of that.

Just because the Valley Authority idea has done a good job there, and I think it has, to pick the idea up and transfer it over to another place where you don't have rundown land and where people have had more of a shake building up an economy, who've been more aggressive, not because they're better people but because they had a more favorable ratio of resources than people did in the older sections of our country, and say this is good for here, I just don't buy it. I don't think the majority of people in the Northwest do. Lord knows they tried for years to sell the thing, and we haven't got it. They tried to sell during a period when the vocal local element of the Democratic party were in control of the Congress, and they still couldn't put it over. If that's the case I don't think we're going to have it really. Anyway we got the degree at Duke.

ERM: You say we, I take it that you assign a good deal of credit to somebody else?

WDH: My good wife is responsible for the degree, there's no question, none whatsoever. Fortunately I was able to take most of my work on my thesis. I didn't have to clutter up my time with a bunch of stuffed-shirt course work, which in most graduate forestry schools is only the same stuff you had as an undergraduate only they throw more of it at you faster. But I got to spend most of my time on my thesis. Out of, I think, thirty semester hours I took at Duke, thirteen of these were on my thesis, which is more than average. The average man who writes his master's thesis in forestry there probably only gets five or six hours credit for his thesis, but by taking thirteen hours and then taking less course work I had the time to spend in the field collecting data. I spent a hundred days in the woods collecting data, not full days always, I'd have maybe some class work for two hours in the morning and then I'd spend the rest of the day in the woods or I'd only have one class in the afternoon and I'd have to get back earlier, that

18 sort of thing. But I spent parts of a hundred days in the woods collecting data for this study.

We had a portable typewriter, but we rented a standard machine because my fingers were always too big to operate a portable typewriter successfully, I always hit two keys at once and as a result I had to make a lot of corrections. I was in one room typing up the final draft of the text of the thesis. All the statistical stuff, the tables and charts and all that had been made. I always do all of that sort of thing first when I'm writing any sort of thing and then do the text last, because part of your text is interpreting the statistical and graphic material. All the mechanics of the selected references for the bibliography and the plates that I was using to illustrate it with captions and all that was prepared and all that sort of thing.

I was in one room typing up the final draft and my wife, Ruth, was in the other room of this little attic apartment of ours which cost twenty-five dollars a month, which was all we could afford. In Durham, North Carolina, we had real warm weather; it was hot at the top of this house with three stories and the attic with sloping roofs, no insulation or anything, of course. Ruth was in the other room typing up the final draft on a piece of paper to very strict specifications with margins a lot stricter than you and I would use them in drafting a manuscript. You got to stay within the space and there are certain rules you have to read and you to do it this way, a certain style you've to follow, each of the words is a little bit different, it's quite a stuff-shirted thing. If your thesis committee of three specific faculty members gets picky about it, they can turn a man down on the mechanics of the thing. It's got to be done perfectly almost.

We started working one day at eight o'clock in the morning on this, and we worked and worked and it kept getting hotter as the day progressed and I kept getting more tired. My wife was stripped down to practically nothing. I was sitting in shorts and slippers, couldn't stand anymore clothing. We'd take a little time off for meals and then we'd go right back and hit her again. Finally at about nine or ten o'clock that night I said, "By god, I just can't do it. I'm just too god damn tired, I can't get this god damn thing done." It had to be turned in at five p.m. the next day. And the girl really worked me over; she was as tough as any hook tender that I ever worked for. She said, "What the hell do you mean you can't do it. You've got to do it. We've come here and spent a year and we aren't going to come back just to get that goddamn degree. Now you get back to that damn typewriter and get that thing out."

We worked all night and finally I looked up and said to her, "Ruth, it's daylight." At five o'clock the next morning we were still working on that god damn thing. She had to finish up this thing and of course hers was much more slower to accomplish than mine because I was beating it out and if I made a mistake, instead of erasing it I'd just X it out and go right on, just like a newspaper man writing out a story on a typewriter. Then I got to the point where I wanted to quit again, no, by god, she slave drove me right back to that typewriter and at three o'clock in the afternoon, this thing is due at five, she got this final thing typed.

There had to be five copies of it, five bound copies had to be made to be turned in and they were due at five p.m. I went down and I said "We can't do it, we might as well

19 forget about it, we'll never get it bound," because generally it took overnight to get it bound. She called up the bindery and told them what the situation was and the guy said to bring it down. I went down and in twenty-five minutes those god damn copies were bound and trimmed, then I went out to the university and drove up this one way street the wrong way on the wrong side, parked, left the door of car open and the motor running and I got in there at twelve minutes to five with Dean Korstian saying, "He'll never make it." So when I say we, you know why, she made me finish it; I wouldn't have done it even if she hadn't. If I'd done it myself I would have flubbed it. So we got the goddamn degree, Master of Forestry. "Jack of all trades, master of none." The whole psychology of what I wanted to do in life was changed that year because I acquired a different kind of responsibility than I'd ever had before--now I had a wife.

This was the spring of 1941--times were still not good in forestry--there's not much industrial forestry going on, it is mostly federal forestry yet, and it slacked off because after the cantonment programs started in 1939 and we came out of the depression a bit, why they slacked off the emergency conservation work and they cut out a great number of the CCC camps. Actually this meant that there was a surplus of foresters. They gave the junior forester examination that year, so I took it and passed it--this was the spring of 1941.

In 1937 I had taken the examination for and had achieved a good grade in it. It was an examination that was 30 percent general aptitude and intelligence test and 70 percent on a written subject matter test. Your background experience didn't have anything to do with it. You had to get 70 in both parts of it and that gave you an average grade of more than 70. If you got 69.9 on either part of the exam you flunked the whole thing. I think I got 83.6 on the exam. If one passed the written exam, he was subjected to an oral examination and while I was at Duke the oral examiner, who was a traveling man, who started in Washington, D.C. and went around the country--he'd go to Washington, D.C. and then up to Detroit and then the Twin Cities and then he'd come to Seattle and then he'd go to San Francisco and then he'd got to New Orleans, then come up to St. Louis. Most of the fellows who lived within a radius had taken this exam. Whoever was to be examined would come in and take it orally if they wanted it. So it was a very unusual experience.

The reason I tell you this is one of those funny things that happens in a country with 180 million people happened to me --really it's a pretty small place. This story illustrates that very well. The civil service oral examiner's name was C. L. Coombs, and he wrote to me in Seattle at my mother's address, which was the one, of course, on my application papers. He asked me to appear at the civil service headquarters in Seattle-- that's the civil service district--at such and such a date if it was convenient, and if not, to let him know. So my mother forwarded the letter to me in Durham, North Carolina. I wrote to him in care of the Civil Service Commission that I was down there and asked if I couldn't take the examination in Richmond, Virginia, or Durham, North Carolina, or Washington, D.C., or some convenient place in the eastern seaboard. He responded from San Francisco saying that he'd meet me in the post office at Richmond, Virginia, in the office of the civil service at such and such a date. If that was satisfactory to write him in New Orleans, Louisiana, and let him know. So we did, and the minute I walked in the room in Richmond, Virginia, which was sometime early in the spring of 1941,

20 this Mr. Coombs said, "By gosh, I was right." I said, "What do you mean?" and he said, "I knew you were one of the Hagenstein family because you resemble them." I said, "What do you mean?" He replied, "Oh, I lived next door to Gus Hagenstein (which was one of my grandfather's brothers in North Platte, Nebraska) for forty years." Grand Uncle Gus was my grandfather's brother. He was the agent in North Platte, Nebraska, for the Hamburg-American and the North German Lloyd Steamship lines. The reason Uncle Gus was located in North Platte was that he's the guy that got the money for safety razors which the fellows were sending back to the family they left in the old country, because that part of Nebraska was settled mostly by Germans--Germans and Czechs. Pretty interesting, wasn't it, to be an agent for a steamship company several hundred miles from the ocean. ®RM72¯ I was offered, as a result of this oral examination, which apparently I passed; a very interesting examination too. Somebody falls and breaks their hip and this fellow asks, "What would you do?" and that sort of thing--to see whether or not you've got a cool head--kinda chides you a little bit about it--asks you a few leading questions. I passed it anyway. Then I began to get inquiries from the Park Service whether I would accept an appointment. I went up to Roanoke, Virginia, and was interviewed by the superintendent®RM70¯ of what was called the Blue Ridge Parkway where I found out that if I was accepted by him I would end up being a park ranger with a badge, but I'd be a traffic cop on a motorcycle. But, when you've got a wife for the first time and in your life and can't go out and grab an arm load of boxcars and be an itinerant logger like I'd been except during my college period up till then in life; you've got a lot different viewpoint. You have to temper your views. So I was seriously considering that if I couldn't find anything else, that I would accept an appointment as a park ranger. Then I was offered an opportunity at Death Valley National Monument and Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. It was an area that I've visited since but hadn't up until time.

Starting at the Association

WDH: At the time this was all going on, I got a letter from Warren Tilton who was the forester for the West Coast Lumbermen's association in Seattle, where the West Coast had its headquarters. This was probably about the end of April 1941. They were offering me a job in what in those days was called the Joint Committee on Forest Conservation of West Coast Lumbermen's Association and Pacific Northwest Loggers Association, which was the predecessor of the Industrial Forestry Association by which I am now employed. It was a group that was started as a result of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) of 1934 to carry out Article X, Schedule C of the Forest Conservation Code of the Blue Eagle. By 1941 they were wanting to expand their program a little bit, and Warren Tilton, who was a University of Washington graduate in forestry and an outstanding man, now deceased, had had his eye on me when I was a student. Partly, I think, (Warren never told me this and I never asked him) because of the interest I took in forest policy matters when I was editor of the University of Washington Forest Club Quarterly. He was interested in that field, the association was working in that field, and I was a kid that was willing to dig into things and stick my neck out and run the risk of political tarring and feathering to take a stand on a controversial issue. Of course in the '30s, when I was in school, the industry and the

21 federal government were not getting along very well because of the issue of whether forestry was to be practiced by the owners of the lands or whether it was to be done under decree of federal law. Because of the background I had from the logging camps and all that--despite the fact that we were really propagandized in the kind of literature we had in the forest schools in the '30s pretty much--most of it written by government employees--to believe that federal regulation was the answer to the forestry problem in the United States. I didn't believe it one damn bit, and of course don't yet. My early-day belief has been substantiated by the fact that once we go over the hump and timber becomes a valuable resource, you can't stop private owners from managing their land to grow trees. They're going to do it as self-interest. And what is self-interest in the replacement of a natural resource is public interest too, because the public is the principal beneficiary to the extent that we keep our forest lands productive. Well, I think that's why this gentleman wanted to hire me. At the same time they hired another man named Charlie Marston, who was one of the outstanding logging engineers in Oregon, to be the association's new forester at Eugene. I was to be stationed in Seattle, and that's how I came on this job.

ERM: This where you first met Colonel Greeley?

WDH: No. I met him first in 1936 when I was editor of the Forest Club Quarterly. Part of my duties on the Quarterly was soliciting articles, and I went to visit him in his office in the Stuart Building in Seattle to ask him to write an article. That's the first time I really ever had any personal contact with him except to be introduced to him at meetings. One of Colonel Greeley's sons was a schoolmate of mine in forest school-- Dave Greeley, who graduated a year after me. During the period that Dave went to school the Colonel came once or twice a year to our Forest Club meetings--just to attend the meeting--not necessarily to speak, but just to attend the meeting and to be introduced. Several times he was also invited as a speaker in the years that I was at school. So, I went to see the Colonel to solicit an article from him for our Forest Club Quarterly. Of course everyone knew who he was, we always stood in awe of the Colonel because he was an imposing figure of a man and rather gruff at times but very much interested in young men. He was a man that was always preoccupied a little bit so that his time was short--because you didn't have much time for an appointment with the Colonel, as I learned much better later on when I became an associate of his. I never had any inkling at the time I was there soliciting that article that I might ever be one of his associates or work for him--although it was only five years later when it came to pass.

ERM: What do your recall about those early meetings with Greeley?

WDH: I remember when I was soliciting this article that, being of course, inexperienced in the editorial field, I didn't know too much about what we really wanted. The Colonel of course asked, "What would you like me to write an article about?" I said, "Any subject of your own choosing, sir." "Well," he says, "what this industry needs is off shore business. I think I'll write an article and call it 'Revival of American Foreign Trade in Lumber'." And by god he did. That's what we published. I'll never forget that because it showed a man that had a quick mind and who was decisive.

22 The Colonel was like all of us--he had some shortcomings--but indecision wasn't one of them. When he made up his mind to move he went--right now.

ERM: What would you say his shortcomings were?

WDH: I think the Colonel had a tendency to be taken in by fakers. The Colonel was such a high caliber man who never took his eye off the main chance. If what we're intending to do is in the public interest let's go ahead and do it and everything else be damned. So that when we got into some of these policy battles between industry and government, some of the fakers on the government side were able to convince the Colonel that they were really just the same kind of people he was and that they were after the same thing. Well, the fact was, they were petty politicians trying to gain points that weren't in the public interest, really. The Colonel would be sucked along by them a little bit. There were some people in industry--we had some employees--I'm not going to mention the names of any of 'em--in the West Coast Association back in those early days when I worked for it, and some long before, during the Colonel's time, according to some of the older men in the association, that really didn't do the association any good. But, they were nice fellows personally; they were able to sell themselves to the Colonel. The Colonel never suspected anybody of having a motive in any way that was less than his own high motives. So he was little bit susceptible to being taken in by the fakers--which characteristic led to two or three pretty serious battles between the Colonel and myself on a couple of subjects.

ERM: Could you cite some of the case in which he was taken in by people you considered to be political fakers? I won't ask you to name anybody among your former colleagues of West Coast Association, but in the political realm where was the Colonel actually duped by people?

WDH: I'll tell you who I have in mind. After Silcox died in 1939, Ferdinand Silcox, who was chief of the Forest Service--the administration for nearly four years had Dr. Earle Clapp as acting forester--or acting chief of the Forest Service. This was in my mind a dirty trick to a man to keep him in an acting capacity for four years. Either you give him the job or you don't--appoint somebody else. So finally, in 1943, Lyle Watts was appointed chief of the Forest Service. Lyle Watts, who had been just prior to that a special assistant to the secretary of agriculture, working on some war food problem that I never understood and prior to six months on that he had been the regional forester for the Forest Service in Portland, Oregon. He covered Region Six.

Watts--to his credit--you always knew where he stood--you knew he was agin ya. He didn't pretend to be your friend and then do something else behind your back. He told you that he believed in federal regulation of private forestry in this country and he was going to work to get it. I think that Watts was capable of convincing Greeley on a number of things that he was on the right track and Greeley went along with some things. Watts was really giving him the business. Greeley really felt that Watts was the man to head the Forest Service. How chiefs of the Forest Service are selected, I'll never know. I have always assumed that the kind of an organization it is that certainly living ex-chiefs are consulted because of the kind of esprit de corps that forms in that kind of

23 an organization. I'm sure that Greeley, prior to the appointment of Watts, was consulted. I don't know that to be fact, of course.

Mind you we were at war, too, when Greeley himself was working all out for war production--the Colonel wanted in the worst way to get in the war himself--you know he was a full colonel in the Corps of Engineers Reserve. He volunteered his services--he was an old war horse just like the fire horse--when the bell rings, off he wanted to run. But he was told by the government to stay right where he was to help this industry to produce lumber for the war. He really put his shoulder to the wheel and did it. Here was the chief of the Forest Service getting appointed during the war, who, instead of really getting off his tail and putting the national forests in a position to contribute timber to the war, spent a major share of his time promoting federal regulation of private forests.

ERM: But he didn't at any time ever sway Colonel Greeley toward regulation did he?

WDH: No, I don't think he did. The Colonel didn't believe in regulation. The Colonel was a man who believed in education. He thought we were going to solve our problem by--when economics become right then we've got the opportunity to show people what they have to do to realize their opportunities. That was the Colonel's philosophy--as it is mine.

George T. Morgan: Actually, didn't Greeley more or less go away from state and federal cooperation under the Clarke-McNary Act?

WDH: The Colonel many times said that the purpose of the Clarke-McNary Act was to prime the pump. Once the pump is primed and the states and the private owners have demonstrated that they're doing what they ought to be doing to protect the lands, that the federal government should gradually withdraw and eventually get out. That was his attitude.

GTM: In talking to Otto Hartwig and Arthur Roberts they mentioned during the first years that Colonel Greeley took over here in the West Coast that it was really a stormy period. They said that the Colonel several times threatened to resign and actually did resign in one case.

WDH: I didn't know that.

GTM: You didn't know anything about it.

WDH: No. He never discussed that with me. No, as a matter of fact, the Colonel was a great conversationalist, but rarely did he ever discuss any personal problems or personal things. You talked forestry with the Colonel when you were with him. He must have had lots of problems in the administration. The West Coast Lumbermen's Association is a pretty good sized outfit--lots of employees and lots of problems, but I made many trips with the Colonel where there would be just the two of us, and you'd have intimate conversation with the man, but we'd talk forestry the whole time--that's all we ever talked about. Once in a while I could draw him out on some of the experiences of the 20th Engineers, and he told me some wonderful stories about them.

24

ERM: Tell me, Bill, did you ever have the feeling that the Colonel felt that some of his old associates in the Forest Service felt that he had more or less gone over to the other side by leaving the Forest Service and taking the job with West Coast. Was he sensitive at all about this?

WDH: No, I don't think he was sensitive. He was conscious of it all right. On several occasions when he and I were discussing our relations with the Forest Service and our problems in connection with those relations, he made the remark that some of his old colleagues in the service, whom he saw in connection with his duties in Washington for the Association--he'd see them at lunch at the Cosmos Club or something like that-- would chide him that he'd sold out to the lumbermen. Pinchot always scathingly referred to the West Coast Group as the "Greeley Lumbermen," that's in the literature some place. You can find that in some articles in the fight that went on in the 1920s when they had their break as to whether it was to go the cooperation/education route or whether it was to go the regulation route. Incidentally, I don't know how many people know this, but Greeley isn't mentioned once in Pinchot's book.

GTM: Yes, I know he isn't. You wouldn't know he existed.

WDH: No. And yet, all the way through in Greeley's book, Pinchot is held up because Greeley had a great deal of respect and admiration for Pinchot as a man. He merely disagreed with him on one major policy issue, that's all. Other than that he thought he was a dynamic leader and the guy who started everything. I react this way to that. The mark of the two men--one was petty and one was big. It's obvious which is which. Pinchot was petty about this thing...Greeley was big...even though he disagreed violently with Pinchot on this regulation issue he recognized the zealous leadership and dynamic leadership that Pinchot gave to this handful of young men that were starting out to practice professional forestry which at that time didn't exist yet in this country. They were starting out to make a profession.

ERM: Bill, did you ever get from Greeley any inclinations as to why he made the choice to come out here?

WDH: No. I never did.

ERM: Did you ever get the notion that he saw in this job here something that afforded him better opportunities than he was given in the Forest Service? Starting on the ground floor as it were, and really preach the gospel to the people who were in the woods--or in the industry.

WDH: From conversations that I had with him over a period of years that because of his early experience in the Forest Service, particularly after he became chief and got a chance to travel throughout the entire forest areas of the United States, that he saw the opportunities that there were for forestry in this region. He was a westerner by adoption, really. He came out here as a young man. He was raised out here. You know I've always thought that this is an interesting thing in his history, that it's so appropriate that he came west by coming in a sailing ship around the horn.

25

ERM: You got to know Greeley much better than you ever had before when you first came to the job with West Coast.

WDH: That's right.

ERM: How closely related were you with him in the early stages of the job?

The Tree Farm System

WDH: I didn't work directly for him. I worked for Warren Tilton, of course, but the Colonel was very close to the forestry department in the association. Mind you, I told you that we had this Joint Committee on Forest Conservation of the two associations. All the people in it were on the West Coast payroll, and forestry was only one of the many departments the Colonel had to look after as executive of the association.

The forestry department was the one that was nearest to his heart always. He spent a bigger proportion of his time on that than the average trade association executive in our industry would do because of his particular interest in it. So many things we did in the field of forestry were done as a result of discussions that our forestry staff, all of us, had with Colonel Greeley. And then, of course, he was interested in going out and seeing things. From time to time why we'd go out and visit woods together, and have lunch together and discuss various forestry matters.

Now it wasn't but a very short time after I came to the association--I started work on June 6, 1941--that Weyerhaeuser Timber Company as it was called in those days, and still oughta be, timber's a hell of a lot better name for a title than Weyerhaeuser Company--because people there don't know what they make any more. As a stockholder, I voted against the change. Weyerhaeuser had developed the Clemons Tree Farm and it was shortly thereafter that the Joint Committee on Forest Conservation, largely at the behest of Colonel Greeley's interest and the possibility of using this term Tree Farm as a means of developing a program to arouse interest in forestry in the country, that the Joint Committee on Forest Conservation made a specific recommendation to the National Lumber Manufacturers Association to start an American Tree Farm System.

Now at that time, American Forest Products Industries, Inc. was in business, but it was a branch and a subsidiary of the National Lumber Manufacturers Association. So in November 1941, following a recommendation made in October by the Joint Committee on Forest Conservation, the board of directors of the National Lumber Manufacturers Association did bring into being an American Tree Farm system with the definition of what a tree farm was--which we had suggested. The thing was in business. In the meantime our own staff here in the Douglas-fir region was out beating the bushes trying to line up some people to apply for tree farm certification under the rules which were adopted nationally. We adopted as our own as well--because we had been part of their authorship in as much as we had suggested it. On the 20th day of January 1942, we certified the first tree farms that were ever certified in the United States. We certify

26 properties as West Coast Tree Farms and in the fall of 1943, by which time American Forest Products Industries was handling the tree farm program although it was still a subsidiary of National Lumber Manufacturers Association, we issued our first certificates which bore the insignia of the American Tree Farm System. The property of the owner was certified as a West Coast Tree Farm by the Joint Committee on Forest Conservation.

ERM: In other words, the tree farm movement got its initial start right here.

WDH: Yes, the idea of calling a property a tree farm was developed by the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company forestry staff and officials. The man who had the most to do with it among the executives of the company was J. P. Weyerhaeuser, Jr.--Phil, as we called him--who was a real leader in the development of that company's forestry and integrated wood utilization programs. Mr. Weyerhaeuser, incidentally, was a member of the Joint Committee on Forest Conservation. The group that I was working for at the time that that group took the tree farm idea Weyerhaeuser had started and developed it into a program. It later suggested that the National Lumber Manufacturers Association have a national program sponsored by industry to encourage the private forest land owners of America to practice forestry.

One of the reasons that I thought the industry hired Colonel Greeley in 1928 was to lead them into forestry. We got immediately into the depression which had knocked the socks off this industry economically, and it had to be set aside. It didn't come to flower then until the NRA brought the Joint Committee on Forest Conservation into being in 1934 and then, of course, we've been making progress ever since. In 1941 we started the Tree Farm Program, we started our nursery in Nisqually, Washington, which today is called the Colonel W. B. Greeley Forest Nursery. Incidentally, I was at the meeting in the basement of the Governor Hotel in Olympia, Washington, in September of 1941 when the decision was made to buy that land and go ahead with it.

The next day, with a transit that I borrowed from Weyerhaeuser Engineering Department up in Tacoma, I surveyed the property that we bought. I've been associated with them with the exception of the time I was away in the war ever since. We've grown in that nursery, which incidentally everybody laughed at and said we were locating it along a main travel highway purely for window dressing and eyewash in 1941, when we bravely announced we were going to grow five million trees a year. We've shipped eighteen crops out of that nursery, and we shipped a hundred and twelve million trees out of it, which is more than an average of five million per year; and our current annual production is running at a rate in the last five years of ten million trees. Currently, we've got a 14 and 1/2 million tree crop in there, and we're in the process of examining sites right now in another location to start a second nursery, because we have no more land up there. We've expanded it up to its limit, so what we've started there is enduring. In addition to that we have the headquarters for our forest genetics program which is headed by Dr. Jack Duffield, who is probably the outstanding man in that field in the United States today.

ERM: To what extent did your tree farm movement bring about a change in what Watts said in the report of 1946 when he says, "There is" and I quote him, "an encouraging

27 advance in good practice by industrial forest owners." Do you think they play a very important role in this?

WDH: I think they had a part. Of course he's talking nationally in his report, rather than just the Pacific Northwest but coincident with our major start into industrial forestry application here. It was going on in other sections of the country, notably in the South at the time. With the advent of the southern industry in the early 1930s, of course the incentive was there. The market for small wood that developed gave the incentive for forestry and it was going on. You couldn't help but feel impressed, as I was, when I was a student at Duke and had the opportunity of traveling throughout the South to talk about all the stuff you've read in textbooks and government bulletins about what a terrible job had been done in the handling of the South in the cutting of regional timber. Every place you went on millions of acres, there were pine trees, and they were there primarily because of the work of Greeley and Allen and a handful of men in the South who had preached and preached and finally brought about organized protection against fires. A lot of those areas have been reproduced a dozen times since the time they were cut but fire would burn the trees up. Once the protection was effective, then they began to endure and that's another part of our story here.

At the time we started the Tree Farm Program, this was the first time in the history of the region when we've had adequate protection again forest fires. When I started in this association, just nineteen years ago last month, we were spending about five cents per acre year, against fire in this region on private lands and we were burning over an average of about a quarter of a million acres a year. Now we're spending on the tree farms an average of fifty cents per acre per year. Now I'll admit we've had some inflation in there, but there's a whole lot of real protection there too, because we've cut down the fire losses seven and a half times on the average of what we had twenty years ago. Until you could lick that one physical thing, the physical factor of fire in forestry, you couldn't get people interested in growing trees. So, that's another plus that came to our aid hand in hand with the Tree Farm Program; we had this improved demand for forest products which made timber more valuable. The combination of all these things is what's made it possible to hang up the records that we've had in the last twenty years. Now, I don't mean to imply a damn bit that we've reached the zenith by a damn site, because we haven't. We've got a hell of a lot further to go than we've come. But the significant thing in this region is that where else in the world, on land so productive has anyone come so far, so fast. We've come in the last twenty years as far as Germany, in the Scandinavian countries, where it took a century to do it.

ERM: That's in part due to the typical more rapid growth in the learning process.

WDH: Sure, it is. I'm merely singling out my own field because that's the one I'm most familiar with.

ERM: To this extent would you say, Bill, that these significant advances have been due to a consolidation of timber ownership in this region in particular?

WDH: Let me answer it this way. First, to really have the application of forestry, stable ownership is one of the needs. That's the first requirement in our Tree Farm Program--

28 stable ownership. In the period prior to 1940, there was a lot of timber ownership in the Douglas-fir region that was held speculatively. The purchase of the timber was financed by timber bonds, held by financial houses in Detroit, Chicago, and various places in the Middle West--the timber not owned at all by operating companies. At that time we had a lot of independent logging operators in this region, who were just in the logging business, nothing more. They owned no timber or very little, and they owned no plant. They bought the timber from other private owners, logged the timber, put the logs in the towable waters, and sold the logs to whoever wanted to buy logs. The mills for the most part that bought those logs owned no timber nor did any logging. They were log-buying .

You had to get rid of this speculative timberland and timber ownership before you could practice forestry, because if those speculative timber holdings, as many of them were and substantial ones, were financed by bonds, they had a maturity date of twenty years, or thirty or forty years. So the people would have to cut the timber in twenty years, thirty years, or forty years to pay off the bonds. Of course many of those properties were in trouble during the long waiting period while they were waiting for their timber to become valuable and be in demand, so that many of them changed hands. I mean, the original bond holders would foreclose upon the companies involved and reorganize the thing. They went through a series of those out in the Lake States country where there were some speculative timber ownerships. A lot of them in the Tillamook burn area. The Tillamook burn made some of them cut the timber long before they wanted to; they had to go in and cut the dead timber to salvage it and try to get something out of what they'd lost in that terrible fire--the original fire of 1933. During the process of the liquidation of the timber on these speculative ownerships, no one wanting cutover land, during the depression lots of them were let go as tax delinquent. At the time the counties would foreclose on them and in some instances the counties would deed them over to the state for management. But in many areas the counties kept them just as lands off the tax rolls and in county ownership.

With the advent of the Tree Farm Program, upon our recommendation, our people went out and bought up thousands upon thousands of acres of formerly tax delinquent lands. I would say upon our recommendation in the last twenty years, our people have bought more than a million acres of cutover land, a lot of which were once speculatively owned and bought back some of their own, because some of them during the depression let some of them go delinquent--not all the companies--but some of them, let lands go delinquent. I can give you a number of examples of that, and we recommended that they go and buy their own lands back. If they once owned and logged original timber that reproduced, and the stuff that's grown up a bit, age classes that they need for the practice of forestry. We got them into the forestry picture through the Tree Farm Program and they went out and picked 'em up.

ERM: This has been influenced a great deal then, Bill, by the knowledge we have come by in regard to the forest capacity to reproduce itself and to add rather tremendous growth, year by year. Is that right?

WDH: You bet. Colonel Greeley often said, and I think it's one of his most quotable quotes: “that the principal asset of the Northwest is the regenerative power of the

29 Douglas-fir forest." In other words to produce big crops of wood. Now that's a continuing asset because of the replaceability feature--it isn't a one-shot deal. You can have it, and have it, over and over and over again through the practice of forestry.

ERM: Do you believe the adaptation of that idea, that information has worked for the development of more stable units of forest land ownership?

WDH: As foresters were able to demonstrate to the owners of companies in our industry that first, you're not in the lumber business or any business without raw materials. If you do have this highly productive land which is crying for management, you can provide the raw material to stay in business through managing that land. The timber you grow on that land will be cheaper than any you'll ever have in the future. It's cheaper than going out and buying timber from other people's land. Then the industry began to accept the idea that forestry could be made a paying proposition and started its practice.

ERM: What role did the Forest Surveys of the 1930s have in confirming this fact?

WDH: They showed for one thing that there were millions of acres of second growth timber. That in itself, in lands which had been clearcut and burned, and reburned in many cases, that in spite of all that, there was no conscious effort being made by the industry in the early days to leave seed sources to do more than protect the timber from fire. The government lands were the neglected areas because the values were considered to be low there; it proved we had it here, and all we had to do was to take advantage of it by doing some of the things that hadn't accidentally served our purpose. To give ourselves the necessary insurance or assurance, that when a reasonable length of time had gone by we'd have some more income to be realized by harvesting another crop of timber.

ERM: Why couldn't those surveys have been made earlier than they were?

WDH: The ones made for the Forest Survey under the authorization of the McSweeney-McNary Act were only authorized by Congress in 1928, and the first field work actually got started here with the appropriations made for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 1930. They could have been made previously if anybody had been interested at the time; Congress wasn't. The private owners who owned the lands weren't. In the case of public land, the government didn't have access to most of it; it was mostly wilderness, except for a few protection roads here and there, so it would have been a pretty tough thing to have done. Of course, this was long before the general use of aerial photographs for making forest type maps. I mean in those days, you know, forest type maps were made by what we call seen-area mapping in which a man climbed up a tree on top of the tallest peak he could find in the vicinity. Then he cut the top off of the tree and he'd put a plane table up there, and he'd sketch in the timber types. That was being done by fellows that I went to school with and they worked out of forest school in the late '30s.

30 ERM: But it would have been much more difficult to do a survey at that time, out here in the early days, than it would have been to do it in the South, where the terrain was less of a problem.

WDH: That's right.

ERM: They could get out and run lines there pretty easily, and could have done so a long time before they did.

WDH: But, when you're in a period when the country and the private owners in it have no firm forest policy. We had a policy--the National Forest System and all that--but you couldn't manage 'em when they weren't cutting any timber. You don't manage old growth forests. All you can do is protect 'em. You manage growing forests--once you've converted the old growth into the series of age classes necessary for continuous forestry. There wasn't the incentive to do that sort of thing. This is one of the things that came out of the Tree Farm Program, which is very good, because one of the things we've always recommended to people is that they survey their lands and find out the condition of their cutover land; also look at their old growth timber to find out where the most decadent timber is so they can set up a priority in forestry to salvage the old growth timber.

For the first time we got the people to go out and find out what the hell they owned. Sure, they always had timber surveys of their merchantable timber. They knew how much old growth timber they had and the boundaries of it estimated and all that for the purposes of operation, but if you're gonna practice forestry you need to know the condition all the time of all your land. We've got 5 and 1/8 million acres of private lands managed as tree farms, which, incidentally, is half the private land in this region, which is a much greater percentage in private land than any region in the country within certified tree farm status today. They've got more acres in the South than we have, they've got more acres in the western pine region, but neither region has the proportion in their total area in tree farms that we have.

We have an advantage in that regard in that we're a relatively small, compact geographic region - just western Oregon and Washington west of the Cascade divide to the sea. We've got thirteen million acres roughly of private land, of which probably nine million acres is industrially owned. The other four million acres owned by what some designate as the small owners; not awfully small by a damn site because if you've got two hundred acres of well stocked second growth Douglas-fir timber in this region today, by my standards, you're a substantial owner because of the values. But that's hardly an industrial tree farm. It's true of many of our small tree farm owners who don't know what they've got on the shelf. Until you know what you've got in the pantry, the cook can't get supper. You can't practice forestry if you don't know what you're dealing with.

31 Forest Research

ERM: How would you compare the wood-using industry with other major industries in our nation in the area of basic research investment, both as in relation to the history and the past of this research, and as regards to the present attitude toward basic research?

WDH: Our industry, on a national basis, is spending far less in the percentage of sales for research in basic fundamentals in both the field of utilization and in forestry, than many other industries are spending. But, on the other hand, we're spending a hell of a lot more now than we were twenty years ago. We're spending a substantial amount of money in research now. Perhaps not enough yet, in some fields. In some maybe we're spending too much. We're like any new industry; new in the sense that we're now applying forestry to our business, in that we have a tendency to ride hobby-horses.

The latest one in American forestry is genetics. While our own association has a strong program in that field that's well financed, spending a lot of money every year on it, it is my own opinion that we have yet to work out precisely what our goals are. We know in a general way what they are, but we don't know quite what kind of trees or what kind of wood that we want in the trees we're gonna try to grow through the application of genetics. What kind of wood those trees should have. We need to know that, because our industry hasn't, as yet, been able to tell us fully, really what it wants. We know that it's desirable to have a straight tree, that's common sense. We know it's desirable to develop trees that have relatively small limbs. We know that it's desirable to have trees that are sexy; that is, ones which have the ability to flower frequently and produce seed crops frequently from a regeneration standpoint. We know that it's desirable to develop trees that are resistant to insects and disease, and to the vicissitudes of weather like early frost that we get once in a while. We know that it's good to have trees of uniform ring growth, at least for mechanical use, that is, for lumber and plywood, for pulp and paper. We know that it’s desirable to have trees with a high proportion of cellulose in the total volume of wood. We know that trees of high specific gravity or density (specific gravity being the index of density), which is desirable both from a mechanical standpoint because the effect of high specific gravity on strength, and on the proportion of cellulose to the total wood. But what is the optimum range of specific gravity? That's something we don't know--now we're attempting to find that out a little bit. Recently, at a talk I made on our genetics program, under the title, "Better Trees Through Genetics", to the Paper Industry Management Association in San Francisco, I frankly put that problem to the pulp and paper segment of our industry. What kind of wood do you fellows want? We need to know that before we can direct the trend of our tree improvement program.

A smaller and smaller proportion of our total wood harvest is going to be devoted to mechanical products, namely lumber. There is going to be a greater amount used for taking wood fibers apart, reassembling them in some form as paper, or particle board, or what not. There's a trend right now in our industry where the pulp and paper segment of our industry is going into the lumber and plywood business, so that it can use the

32 leftovers from them for raw material for the pulp mills, all of which is designed primarily to get better utilization of their timber.

Even though the pulp segment of our industry has had a tendency to brag, that is, the employees in it, the management and foresters too, that they're the modern segment of our industry as compared to the old-fashioned lumber segment and they utilize the timber better and all that--the fact is that the pulp industry only utilizes about 60 percent of the wood. Forty percent of the wood which is in the form of lignin is pretty much unused. There's a lot of things that chemical research has developed as potential products of lignin.

There's ten thousand things that can be made from lignin that we know about today, despite the fact that we don't know what the structure of the lignin molecule is. The formula for it as you know is CxHxOx. The number of atoms of the three basic organic elements therein are unknown. But still, wood chemists have been able to take it apart and reassemble it to the tune of ten thousand different products. But, those same products, many of them could be made from coal tar, from the by-products of refining of petroleum, and from agricultural surpluses, surpluses of grain--blackstrap molasses and things like that--all of those products, many of which can be made more economically from those other sources of material than they can be from lignin as yet.

The only advantage we've got over the petroleum and coal tars as yet is that we're dealing with a replaceable resource; the others are finitely exhaustible. Not relatively in our time, but looking long into the future, long after we're dead and gone, when coal tar is a much more expensive raw material than it is today; when the by-products of petroleum are much more expensive by-products than they are today. Wood may be the most economical source for a lot of these organic compounds, which can be made into food, textiles, synthetics, pharmaceuticals, and thousands of organic chemicals, the uses of which as yet are undreamed of. You can gee whiz that clear out of proportion and get yourself clear up into the stratosphere. I don't intend to do that because I'm trying to be realistic about it.

Wood Supply

WDH: It's pretty clear that with the kind of forests that we're going to grow--our second growth forests--that a lot of the wood is still gonna have an important value for structural use: in the form of poles, structural lumber, plywood, which may be its highest use, and return the most to the owner or the grower of the timber from the harvest of the crop. Being integrated by having a forest and having a and a plywood plant and a pulp mill, a man is going to be able to get much more per unit of wood harvested than the man who's got only one of those three types of plants. And that's the trend in our industry.

The trend toward integration has been going on for a long time. Weyerhaeuser is the outstanding one, of course, in this region at the present time, but we have eight or ten other companies that are going that way and we have a lot of small companies, believe it or not, and by small I mean small as far as our own region is concerned, a company

33 that produces as little as 20-25 million feet of logs a year, that now are quite highly integrated, in that basically the needs are for logs for a sawmill, but in the last five or seven years they've added a green veneer plant. Following the addition of a green veneer plant and selling their veneer to people who lay up the veneer into plywood, they have now branched out and added a lay-up plant of their own. And they also have a chipper, so that the leftovers from this veneer and plywood plant and the leftovers from the sawmill that are not used for steam, those that are in form that can be made into chips, are manufactured into chips which are sold to the pulp and paper companies or to board companies. And in some instances now, in which these fellows are beginning to go into the field of having a chip board, or a particle board, or a hardboard plant of their own so they don't sell chips anymore.

Now these are relatively small companies because except for the pulp end of it they can get into that with timber supplies that they have, the timber growing capacity of their land with the opportunity to supplement their timber supplies a bit with publicly purchased timber. When they've got the utilization they can afford to pay the highest prices and be the successful bidders for timber. They can get into these integrated fields with relatively small amount of capital. Now it isn't small in terms of yours and my personal finances but in comparison to building a pulp mill for example, it's much more feasible for them. That's the growing trend in our industry. That's going to keep a lot of these relatively small, family-owned companies in business as permanent segments of this industry. And that's good!

ERM: But isn't it also true that a number of these have fallen by the wayside now or are being bought out by the larger corporations? I'm looking at situations like Pilot Rock Lumber Company over here in Pilot Rock, Oregon. Here is an integrated company. Here is a company that has a fair class of timber land--over a hundred thousand acres I understand--that's selling out to Georgia Pacific.

WDH: Are they? I didn't know that.

ERM: Well, I've given you a little bit of information then.

WDH: Well, I'm not surprised. Georgia Pacific wants to diversify and in order to diversify, they have to buy other companies.

ERM: We were over to visit with Al Moltke the other day, and I don't think we're divulging anything that was secret--it was in the local paper. Al told us that there were negotiations on right now between them and Georgia Pacific to sell out for about twelve million dollars.

WDH: Well, that's life...although I hadn't heard about it.

ERM: And the reason for this is their own lands are not capable of providing them of their needs before they must fall back upon government timber purchase. They're in a position, where they can't afford to lose out on more than one or two timber sales, or they're done.

34 WDH: There are a lot of people in that condition. But here's what's happened as a result. That's been one of the economic considerations which has driven a lot of these relatively small companies into integrated utilization. A good example of what I mean, by this class of company getting into this, is one of our members down in Lane County. This is a company that's been in business for over fifty years. It's the Hult Lumber Company. Hult originally had a rough green sawmill out of Horton, Oregon. That was the beginning and their first operating area and they have a tree farm of their own right behind it and a big plot of federal timber right behind that. Also in addition to their rough, green sawmill they have a lath plant. They're one of the few that still manufacture Douglas-fir lath. They salvage handle blanks which they sell to a handle factory to make broom handles and mop handles which are made out of Douglas fir.

They realized they were going to have to be competitive for government timber, which they need because they haven't got enough of their own to take care of even their sawmill. They've got to supplement it with supplies from their tree farm and outside timber. They bought a remanufacturing plant so they could dry and finish their upper grades. They bought one at Junction City on the railroad. They cut the green lumber in their sawmill which is not on the railroad, truck it to Junction City where they dry it and plane it. They built a green veneer plant in Horton, out from the sawmill. Last November they finished building and brought into production a plywood plant and they shipped the green veneer into the green veneer plant in Junction City adjacent to their green veneer manufacturing plant right from the same industrial site. Of course when they added the green veneer plant they added a chipper. They're selling chips that are leftover from the green veneer plant and the plywood plant and the sawmill to one of the pulp companies. They're in a much better position to compete for that government timber than many of their competitors who are bidding on that same timber who only have a sawmill and/or plywood plant.

ERM: Pilot Rock Company has most of those things...including a hardboard plant.

WDH: But they're in a region of low timber growth, relatively, compared to the west side.

ERM: Yes, that's true.

WDH: The pine area is a discouraging thing. I mean, our average timber growth in the Douglas-fir region is five times per acre that of the western pine region. There you have to have a tremendous area of land to have a reasonable timber growing capacity. A man here could have a township of timber, thirty-six square miles, which is not big, it sounds big to us that live on less than a quarter of an acre where our home is, but it's not a big thing when you're talking about growing timber on an eighty- or hundred-year rotation. If you're got 25,000 acres, you're going to cut 250 acres a year on your location and that's all. Two hundred and fifty acres would provide twenty million feet a year, that's all you're going to get out of it. Twenty million, not very much. Maybe twenty-five million. And twenty-five million will provide a plant like Hult with the logs they need. They've probably increased it a little bit now because of their plywood, maybe it takes thirty; but they took twenty and twenty-five before, now it's thirty million a year. To get that same thing, instead of having 25,000 acres you'd have to have 125,000 acres. And

35 you're over there; you're a hell of a long ways away from transportation in many areas. It's not true of Pilot Rock because they've got that board plant there, but they don't operate it. U.S. Gypsum is their operator--they operated originally and they didn't do too well with it. So they leased it out to a company that wanted to make a wood wall board to supplement their gypsum board and what not, you know, to have a rounded line of building boards because Pilot Rock had a hard time merchandising their board product.

I think that's one of the reasons that Weyerhaeuser is interested in buying out U.S. Plywood, partly because of their outlets; they've got these plywood warehouses all over the country. Weyerhaeuser would use them to get rid of their plywood production and the hardboard production. They get an integrated merchandising as well as integration in the manufacturing. A lot of people decry that it's an inevitable trend in our industry. It doesn't mean that we're going to end up with half a dozen giants in our industry and nobody else. I think we're going to end up with a lot of companies that are well integrated and a lot of 'em are gonna be what we would categorize in the basis of their log production and/or their dollar volume of sales--medium-sized companies and I think that's healthy for the economy.

ERM: By my question I didn't mean that I was against it. As matter of fact, to look at it historically, it only indicates that what has already long ago happened in other major industries, is happening now in the wood using industry.

WDH: Let me tell you why it took so long to happen here, to burn some of these ends. Earlier we talked about having fifty or sixty thousand sawmills in the United States. It meant that a man could get into the lumber business with a relatively small operation, with a relatively small amount of capital, and he did; because the original market two generations ago, for most of the lumber that a man made, was right in the area where he was. He hauled in the horse and wagon right to the place where it was being used in many parts of our country where there was timber. That was true in the Middle Atlantic States. It was true in the middle part of the Lake States. Not true in the remote rural areas and of course it was never true out here except in the very early days when we were utilizing all the logs at home.

ERM: In the early days it wasn't true Bill, most of it was going down the coast to San Francisco.

WDH: Right...that's right. Lumber production from the original mills here went south because we had no population up here.

ERM: No population to sell it to.

WDH: No. Until we got some population. Until the railroads came here, we couldn't have had a big business, despite the tremendous timber resource. The difference there is, that if you wanted to get into steel business you had to be big. You couldn't have an economic sized thing; you couldn't have a goddamn iron smelting process for Christ's sake!--not even one goddamn furnace--without having an investment of fifteen or twenty million dollars. So mainly you had to be a big public stock held corporation in order to raise the finances.

36

ERM: Well, there was a period in our history Bill, when there were a lot of little smelters in the woods.

WDH: Yeah, but when the industrial revolution came through, and the Bessemer process was developed, then we got big.

ERM: They soon went out of business.

WDH: That's right. That's partly the sort of thing we're going through. Originally our business was entirely the lumber business--no longer--it's a mistake for any of these lumbermen's associations to call themselves lumbermen's associations--they oughta be forest products associations, because the whole thing is the log as it comes from the tree. We don't give a damn, really, what we use it for--and society doesn't either. Society just wants us to make all the products that we can make that'll service some utility and compete with other materials that are made into similar products. They don't give a damn what we use the logs for--and we shouldn't either any more. We should use'em for the highest value we can get out of 'em--for the best service to society--and that's what economics and competition always in the long run impel. We may be slow getting started.

We're getting a little far afield from the question of research here. The truth is we should spend more money on research and we will; there's no question of it. Our industry is now beginning to be managed by professional managers rather than entrepreneurs. That's a growing trend in this integration and a professional manager is brought up on a diet of the necessity for research in order to stay competitive. There's some disadvantages to the professional manager but there are more advantages, and that's why we got 'em.

ERM: Do you believe that a larger investment of this industry in research might provide answers to the problem of finding expansion of efforts in trade promotion? The two have to go hand in hand...

WDH: A symbiotic thing sort of--you gotta have both...

ERM: Isn't there some panic right now over this trade promotion matter, the answer might be better solved in investment of a little more in research.

WDH: I really don't know the complete answer to that. It's a little outside of my field. I'm the forestry missionary in this industry, that's my job. Doing so I've had to become acquainted a lot with other things that I'm interested in. I've really had a liberal education in economics in forestry in the last twenty years. I've had some real good teachers, Colonel Greeley for one who had an understanding of the economics in forestry way beyond most of his contemporaries. You look back in some of his early studies in Forest Service on economics and timber supply. I think the one he made in 1918 is outstanding. The data that were available to study it were damned inadequate because we knew very little about the forests of the United States then as compared with today.

37

ERM: Yes, I think most of the things you mentioned today, that is, protection, market entry, and taxation are part of it.

WDH: That's right. There's nothing new in this sort of thing, really. We just regurgitate 'em and express 'em differently and bring 'em up to date in the light of present conditions. There hasn't been a change in forest policy really from day one. It's all spelled out if you'll go back into the history of it. Pretty well documented--takes a little time to spell it out, E. T. Allen in 1911 predicted exactly the steps we're going through in Douglas-fir forestry and we're doing them. His little book Forestry in the Pacific Northwest was published by the Western Forestry and Conservation Association in 1911. Allen was a genius. One of the few that I ever knew. Allen said it's kind of an average book, though. Beautiful writer.

ERM: His command of the language is remarkable. He must have had an awful lot of understanding on the public relations aspect too, although I've been told by some people that he was basically rather shy.

WDH: Yes, he was. He was a man that was better with a written word than with a spoken word. I don't think that he was half as effective a witness, for example before a congressional committee, as Colonel Greeley was.

ERM: You're right.

WDH: To be an effective witness before a congressional committee, first of all a man must be able to command the respect of the people on the other side of the table on the basis of his knowledge of the subject they're discussing. Secondly, he's got to be able to convince them of his sincerity of purpose. Third, he's got to be a bit of a showman and know when to dramatize, to emphasize the points so that they won't be forgotten. It's a rare person that has all three of those attributes.

ERM: You feel that Greeley had all those.

WDH: Oh, undoubtedly. He was one of the finest witnesses I ever saw.

ERM: But you would not classify Allen as being able at all in those requirements?

WDH: Well, Allen had the sense of drama, he had his facts. I shouldn't try to classify him with respect to those because I didn't know him as I did Greeley. I never saw him perform before a congressional committee as I did Colonel Greeley. But I watched the Colonel under adverse circumstances, too; because when you appear before Congress, senators have a tendency to badger a witness. A witness has to be able to stand up and take that kind of abuse calmly. Of course in the last thirteen years, I probably had more experience before congressional committees than any man in this industry.

I've been one of the principal spokesmen before Congress, because our own association has dealt in national policy matters since the time began. We're one of the few regional groups that do. Most regional groups depend on the national groups to do it; we never

38 have. We worked with the national groups, but we've got such important public forest land problems here, having such a big proportion of federal timber, for example in our own region which is vital to the welfare of our industry and the economy of the region, that we have to be actively interested in trying to guide the policy, to make certain the best possible job is done with those lands. It isn't enough just to do it on our lands; we've got to do it on the public land too, and that's why we've been so active in it. We haven't for many years dealt in state problems at all, in state policy matters. We work with the agencies involved on some of the administrative things, but we don't work in the Oregon or Washington legislatures. There are other organizations in the industry which do, and our only function is that they want us to help develop some data for them or once in a while appear as a witness. But, when it comes to Congress, why we're right in there in the front lines.

ERM: Who are some of the most able men among your contemporaries, who have worked with you in Washington on some of these things?

WDH: Leo Bodine is one of them--former executive vice-president of the National Lumber Manufacturers Association; Dick Colgan is another, who is a former executive vice-president of the National Lumber Manufacturers Association.

ERM: Down in northern California.

WDH: He works for Shasta Forests Company. We've had a lot of able assistance from some of the leaders in the industry--not just the employees of associations--some of the industry principals. One who is extremely able in presenting our views on things is Ed Stamm, who formerly was our president--now is a retired vice-president of Crown Zellerbach Corporation.

ERM: Stamm swung a pretty big ball in the industry both here on the coast and nationally, didn't he?

WDH: Oh yes, he's widely known and widely respected and is not a forester by profession. He's a civil engineer, but he's one of the strongest advocates of industrial forestry in the United States, I'd say. Along with two or three associates in his company gives strong leadership to his own company's forestry program, which is one of the outstanding ones in the nation. We've had a lot of good men working in our activity. You want to remember, of course, that a lot of our principals are rather shy about dealing in policy matters with Congress. The strongest point, I think, is helping formulate policy on which an association like ours would stand, and then the public presentations generally are made by an employee of the association. In our own case since 1948, principally myself. I mean, that's one of the jobs you have as manager of an association, to be its spokesman publicly on policy matters and that's the field which I've devoted considerable time since I've been at the helm in this association. In the earlier days when I was working here, I helped work up a lot of the data and to write many of the statements that were presented by others.

39 Industrial Forestry Association

ERM: Who were the people that carried the ball for you publicly?

WDH: The principal spokesman for the industry until 1945 was Colonel Greeley. Warren Tilton did some of it and it seems to me that there was greater reliance on some of the national policy problems upon the national associations in those days. Our situation has changed a little bit since we've been separated from West Coast Lumbermen's Association. The Joint Committee was dissolved and the Committee on Forest Conservation was done away with on July 1, 1949. West Coast Lumberman's Association and Pacific Northwest Loggers Association decided that time was right that the forestry activity should set off by itself as a separate organization, because the primary purpose of the West Coast Lumbermen's Association was trade promotion. And the Loggers Association on the problems of the loggers other than forestry. Forestry, in a word, is mainly a matter of timber supply. Something that is so vital to the future of our industry and our economy in this region that we have to concentrate on it by having it more strongly financed and more independent of the other activities in this action. Colonel Greeley was one of the architects of making that separation. At the time he was retired, he was still a vice-president of the West Coast Lumbermen's Association. He was active in the affairs of the Joint Committee on Forest Conservation even after his retirement in 1945. He was one of the founders, literally, of what is now the Industrial Forestry Association.

ERM: Was there any struggle within the association to block this separation?

WDH: No, I don't think so. One of the main reasons for it was that the principal financing of the Joint Committee on Forest Conservation was by the West Coast Lumbermen's Association which was made up of companies that were land owning companies that logged their own timber and processed their own logs, and a lot of log- buying sawmills that owned no timber. They were paying the entire cost of our forestry program or most of it. The Loggers Association contributed a minor amount--West Coast put up most of it--the loggers part of the balance. What happened was the West Coast actually paid it, and then they billed the Loggers Association every month for their proportion of the share.

We were all employees of West Coast Lumbermen's Association, even though we operated under this cumbersome title of Joint Committee on Forest Conservation. But the pulp and paper segment of our industry was getting more important in this region and so was the plywood. Not being eligible to be members of the Lumbermen's Association and only some of them belonged to the Loggers Association, they weren't paying very much of the cost. The principals of the board didn't feel the log-buying sawmills were getting much in the way of direct benefit, which they weren't. What this separation did was put it down to where we entered into membership contracts with companies that really were extremely interested in our activities and which, for the most part, were land owning companies. But in all segments: pulp and paper, plywood, and lumber.

ERM: The separation resulted in greatly broadening the base of your support.

40

WDH: That's right, and it did something that was a very logical thing forestry-wise in this region where there's a highly integrated industry. It brought all the segments of the wood-using industry into one camp through the common interest of forestry. We have the only regional organization of this kind in the United States. Other places they've got a lumbermen's association handling forestry for the lumber segment of the industry, and in the same region they've got a pulpwood association handling it and so on. This way we're altogether in the same camp because we don't give a damn what the logs are used for. Let's just keep the logs comin' that's all through the practice of forestry--and that's the keystone of this association. I think that we're probably the most diversified of any forestry association in the country in our activities, and I think we're probably better financed than any of them. We've got a bigger staff than any of them and, in my opinion, we still have a growing program. We sponsor the Tree Farm Program in this region; we engage in forest tree improvement and research; we operate this large nursery at Nisqually; we have a specialist on our staff in the field of forest taxation because we consider it our number one private forestry problem in the region; we're engaged in a major way in the field of forest policy on a national level.

While we're not in the public relations business and do not have a public relations man, the very nature of our activity is indication that we tell the industry stories honestly, constructively, courteously in every place we can. We try to get public acceptance of the importance of our industry in the economy here and the problems that we have in trying to safeguard our contribution to the economy through reasonable taxation, through effective protection against fire, and through constructive legislation rather than destructive. Our dealing in behalf of the industry in the field of administrative policy on the part of the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the state forestry departments is very important to that segment of our industry that depends upon public timber. As our membership has grown, as it has steadily, we have been attracting more and more companies that are not landowners--whose interest primarily in our activities is the work that we do in the field of government timber because it's their lifeblood.

We started out on July 1, of 1949 under a terrible handicap. Colonel Greeley always wanted to keep the name Forest Conservation in anything we did, so we started out as a separate organization with membership contracts between individuals or companies and what was called Forest Conservation Committee of Pacific Northwest Forest Industries. I'd go try and sell a membership contract to a fella and he's say, "hell, I belong to too many committees already." You had something that was called a committee he didn't think it was an association. So we couldn't sign 'em up. So for two and a half years we labored under that terrible difficulty and finally in the spring of 1952 after a struggle in our board, in which Colonel Greeley and I were on opposite sides, we became the Industrial Forestry Association.

Copeland Report

WDH: Of course the secretary of agriculture and the chief of the Forest Service probably aided and abetted by a president of the United States who believed this was something that had to happen if the country were to do the job that he thought was

41 necessary in forestry. Franklin Roosevelt backed the idea of federal regulation of private cutting practices very strongly. Congress, at the time, had many legislators in it who were similarly minded. The Forest Service was able to document the lack of forestry in the United States on private lands, very well at the beginning of this, in a momentous document of 1677 pages and two volumes--known as the National Plan for American Forestry. However it's more popularly referred to as the Copeland report, because Dr. Royal S. Copeland, a United States senator from New York, was chairman of the subcommittee which authorized the printing of this document. The document was entirely prepared by the Forest Service and using government data, the estimates of what the situation was in the forestry level of that date in the United States.

When I was a student at forest school, these two volumes were one of our textbooks. I can reach over here ten feet from where I'm sitting and show you my annotated copies. One of the final examinations that we had in the course of forest economics included questions that came entirely from this report. To this day, the professor who conducted the course thinks that I cheated in the examination because I got a hundred on it, because I'm one of those rare individuals that's endowed with a photographic memory-- in that I can look at a page and I don't have to try to memorize it--I can reproduce it at will--particularly when its contains numbers. He didn't believe that a man could answer such questions off the top of his head to what the percentage of federal forest ownership in Oregon is in one question and what the proportion of hardwood and softwood in Maine is in the next. In the following question determine within a 10th of a percentage point how much income counties were deriving in certain states from the sale of national forest timber and private timber and so on. I was able to do it because I was able to read these statistics and reproduce them at will.

The Copeland Report was a hoax in the minds of many people, because no one really knew what the forest situation was in the United States. After all, the Forest Survey had only been authorized since the McSweeney-McNary Act of 1928, and the first few surveys were undertaken in 1930. So here in 1933, at the advent of the New Deal, they publish this document which is an indictment of private forestry; the facts are that the government wasn't practicing any forestry on its vast holdings at the time either. Because the time hadn't come in economics in forestry in this country when government timber was an important part of our timber supply, as it is today, for example. But with the blueprints set forth as to what the situation was, or was estimated to be, and what needed to be done to rectify the problem, the drive for regulation was on and the Copeland Report was the bible for the whole thing for a period of a decade. Then in 1939 Congress brought into being a Joint Congressional Committee on Forestry, which held hearings throughout the United States in important forest centers to get the advice and opinions of local people as to what should be done to put the country on a sound forestry basis.

ERM: In other words, Bill, the Copeland Report recommendations had not been implemented after its publication.

WDH: Very few of them.

42 ERM: All right. Following that up, doesn't this evidence that Roosevelt was not committed to implementing the suggestions of this report as you have said he was. Here he had a Democratic Congress...

WDH: Yeah, but with the southerners in control--the southerners coming from a section of the country where private owners own most of the land--forest land and all other kinds of land. They didn't have the strength in the committees to put over a program. The same thing applies today. When you get a shake-up in the North or the West and you turn out one group of congressmen when the temper of the country changes, they either want people to move more to the left for a while or more to the right for a while. The southerners keep on coming back in, so inevitably they gravitate to the front of the seniority system, and they become the powerful chairmen of the committees and subcommittees. You can't do anything in Congress, really, without the sanction of the committee chairman to which legislation if referred--because he's all- powerful in the handling of it. He can choose to hold hearings or not, just as he sees fit. If his feeling is that the private landowners ought to be left to manifest their own destiny as far as forestry is concerned, you haven't got a chance in the world to get a bill out of his committee.

ERM: That's true, Bill, but if the president, Roosevelt in this case, had felt strongly about this particular legislation, he could have exercised the powers of the chief executive over the members of his party in chief committees. He could have affected this program if he had wanted to, and he did in other areas.

WDH: Yeah, except when he engaged in the purge or the attempted purge of the southern senators that hadn't backed his program fully--for example, the late Senator George of Georgia and late Senator Barkley--later Vice-President Alben Barkley of Kentucky. They beat the hell out of him in their own states because they were re- elected. He used, as any president does, and I suppose is legitimate--depending upon your views--the power of the executive allocation of funds that are appropriated for certain things. The executive had a lot more of that during the New Deal Days with all those emergency programs than we have today. To try to whip people into line for his legislation; there's plenty of examples in other fields of the economy than forestry where the president did just that. But in this instance, the people from the South are close to the land. They're closer to the land than people in any other part of the country. The South in the 1930s was still basically an agricultural economy and anything that smacked of the government regulating in any way, how a farmer is to handle his land, was very, very distasteful to the average southern congressman or senator. Despite the great industrialization of the South, principally since the end of World War II, I think that's true today.

ERM: In other words, you ascribe the failure of Congress and the executives to carry out the suggestions of the Copeland Report principally to the reluctance on the part of southerners in Congress to pass such legislation through their committees to the floor of the two houses.

WDH: I think that's right. I think one of the things that will bear out my contention there is this: that the very first regulation bill was the so-called omnibus bill--the author

43 of which was Senator Bankhead--the late Senator Bankhead of Alabama. A powerful man in the Congress; a man who had been speaker of the house as part of his service in the Congress. A respected, better than average congressman and senator. His whole public career was a constructive one. He was the author of the bill that was supported by the administration. He didn't push to get the thing into action and there were never any hearings held on it. There were never any hearings held on any of the regulation bills in the '30s. There was the Joint Congressional Committee on Forestry that held the general inquiries, looking into the forest situation in the United States, but they weren't hearings specifically on any proposal to regulate private forestry. It was an information- seeking political grandstand witch-hunting sort of a series of hearings that have become so popular in the last five years with the Republicans in the White House and the Democrats controlling the Congress. The people that understand those things write it off mainly to politics. You don't get constructive legislation out of such forays into the hearing field. I don't mean in just our field, in any field of legislation, not just in forestry.

We had a series of hearings out here in 1955 affectionately referred to in the trade as the "Chudoff-Neuberger circus," which had a real opportunity studying the federal timber sales to really investigate what was being done to put the federal forests at the level of management that they need to be for our economy today--and instead they were used primarily as a political vehicle for the participants--that's all. Very few of the recommendations which came out of the committee report were adopted, so you can write the hearings off as a great waste of public money.

ERM: What about the hearings that Greeley was a major participant in while he was still with the Forest Service? Like the Senate Select Committee on which came out here where Senator McNary sat as chairman--do you feel the same about those hearings?

WDH: No, those were entirely different. Those were constructive hearings. I've read the hearing record and the reports of the committees of the legislation which led to the enactment of the Clarke-McNary Act of 1924. I would say that those hearings contributed measurably to the advancement of , which was the first thing needed. In order to get people interested in forestry you had to be able to say to an owner that we can assure you now we've got organized protection, so when harvest day rolls around on the tree farm there'll be something to harvest because we haven't burned it up in the meantime. I think those were extremely constructive. I think the hearings that led to the enactment of the McSweeney-McNary Act were constructive hearings. I personally have had the experience over a period of seventeen years of sitting in and listening as an auditor and in the last fourteen years of being a participant, as a witness in hearings on various forestry subjects. Except for the prosaic hearings that were held prior to the consideration of authorization and appropriations measures, most of the rest of them have been primarily political hearings, designed by the people in charge to advance their own causes and not really geared to find out what the forestry problems were and to seek constructive suggestions on how to solve them.

GTM: Do you think these Clarke-McNary hearings were so successful because of the fact that Colonel Greeley went into these hearings in all cases loaded with statistics,

44 facts, and also primed the other participants so that they knew exactly what the facts were?

WDH: In his day, as the record shows, no one ever went into a congressional hearing that concerned forestry that was better informed or who laid his groundwork and had done his homework beforehand, better than Colonel Greeley. With one possible exception--and that man was his teammate in the development of the Clarke-McNary Act--E. T. Allen--who was for many years the forest council of the Western Forest and Conservation Association and who was one of the geniuses that did come out of our profession so far. A self-made man--a non educated man--one of the founders of our professional society--his father was a professor from Yale, I believe--had a timber claim in Longmire, Washington, which is now in Mount Rainier National Park. Those kids had a tutored education from a Ph.D. father up in that timber claim--so even though he didn't have a formal education one can't say that he was uneducated, because he was extremely well educated. Probably of all the men who used the designation of forester he was on of the most constructive in our history. He was probably the most articulate. His writings were very literary.

GTM: Do you know very much about the relationship between Colonel Greeley and E. T. Allen?

WDH: I know a lot about it because I knew both men and knew them both well. They were entirely different men. One was strict and the other was less so. Colonel Greeley was a man who led a well-ordered life. Allen liked spiritus frumenti. Greeley didn't disapprove of a man who took a drink because he took one himself, but the Colonel was extremely temperate in the use of liquor. Allen was the opposite upon occasion. But despite this great difference in their personal conduct, they were both men who had their eye on the ball. Forestry was the one thing--get the fire out of the woods--and they worked against the common enemy and as it seems did it very successfully. No similar team has shown up yet in American forestry like the Greeley-Allen combination to lay the groundwork and set the footings for the structure that has become American forestry. They were the best.

ERM: They did work harmoniously as a team?

WDH: Very well.

ERM: Greeley's New England Puritanism did not cause him to feel out of harmony with Allen in any way.

WDH: I don't believe so. I had the opportunity of knowing Colonel Greeley a lot more intimately than I did E. T. Allen, because E. T. Allen when I first attended the meeting of the Western Forestry Conservation Association in the fall of 1938 was almost ready to retire and gave the impression at the meeting at least, that liquor had got the best of him. So a lot of my opinions of Allen are from reading his writings and talking to men who knew him when he was in his prime.

45 In 1906 Greeley was twenty-seven years of age and Allen of course was somewhat older--I don't recall precisely how old Allen was but I assume that Allen would be eight to twelve years older than Greeley. By the early 1920s Greeley was in his early forties and Allen would be a man in his early fifties or thereabouts. Things change men. Greeley had gone through the experience of being the commanding officer of the 20th Engineers in France in that tremendous effort that our Army made to sustain the wood need of the war from the French forests. Any of us who've had any experience in being abroad in the military during war, to put it mildly, there's a slight moral decline in changing in an individual's evaluation of personal conduct of people. In other words, you get a lot more tolerant of departures by others of what you think of is the ideal code for a man to follow--and they're the ones that may be your own. There's a natural tendency for most people as they grow older to get more tolerant in that respect anyway. As a matter of fact, that's the nice thing about growing old, is the fact that you get so much more tolerant of other people and you find out when you're forty years of age that you're no longer the keeper of the public morals--you've got to look after your own.

Even though Greeley and Allen might have had a clash in personalities around differences in their family backgrounds or their natural inclinations as individuals in 1906--certainly by 1920 they were both old enough and mature enough and experienced enough. And both being enthusiastic that the important thing that had to be done to let forestry develop naturally as it should, through evolution in the United States, you had to lick the fire problem. They got together and if they had any differences certainly ironed them out and put that thing through the Congress. It was at a time when Governor Pinchot--as Colonel Greeley always called him--and his adherents were pushing hard to get the Capper bill enacted into law. To put Uncle Sam in the position of regulating private forestry.

Greeley wasn't a disbeliever in regulations, but he believed that before regulation was tried we had to lick the fire problem first. We had to exhaust the educational approach and prove deftly that it had sailed. What he had in the back of his mind all the time, as he indicates in his book, and as I know he believed from my personal association with him is, that in time, a lot of these things that were fancied as problems worked themselves out because they were economic problems. Mainly, the one I have alluded to previously in this interview, namely that once we go over the hump in the timber demand-supply situation and timber becomes a valuable resource, we don't have to coerce people into growing timber. They're going to grow it because they can make money doing it. It's happened in my lifetime.

New Deal Lumber Code

ERM: There was a great deal of activity during the '30s, Bill, in the formulation of the lumber code of the NRA. Greeley and Allen and Dave Mason and others out here had a lot to do with that.

WDH: Greeley was the principal architect of Article X, Schedule C of the code. I probably have more records on that, minutes of meetings and what not, than anybody else in the country. As a matter of fact in 1959, when we prepared the little publication

46 that you're familiar with, entitled "A Quarter Century of Industrial Forestry in the Douglas Fir Region", which was my report to our subscribers at our annual meeting in April 1959, I outlined how the Joint Committee on Forest Conservation came into being as a result of the NRA code and outlined the activities a little bit that we took in it. But there's some place I discussed Greeley's part in the code in a review that I wrote of his book Forests and Men. I wrote two book reviews of it, one for the Congressional Record, and one which is published in the Journal of Forestry. Both of them in the year of publication.

Offhand I recall that one of those reviews as saying that Greeley reviewed the forestry program which was the Industrial Forestry Program begun by the late not-lamented NRA and the details of how Article X, Schedule C, came into being--he was the principal author of it. In talking with a number of the other men who participated in that--mind you now, this was before I worked here--many of them agree that he had the most to do with it. He was really the leader. The significant thing in the NRA, which was an ill-fated thing and only lasted less than two years before the Supreme Court of the United States found it to be unconstitutional, was that instead of stopping the forestry activity that was started which led to this association, ultimately, this industry's forestry program and that of western pine industry, the southern pine industry, and a number of the others that were primarily trade associations in the forest industry of the United States.

All of them were continued following the demise of the NRA. And of course our own, largely at the behest of Colonel Greeley and the members of the Joint Committee on Forest Conservation. Such men as D. S. Denman of Crown Zellerbach Corporation, J. P. Weyerhaeuser Jr., of Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, Corydon Wagner of the St. Paul and Tacoma Lumber Company, the late William Vaughan of the Coos Bay Logging Company, Norman Jacobson, who for many years was the chief forester of the St. Paul and Tacoma Lumber Company, and of course the staff that the Joint Committee had--Warren Tilton for one, who hired me to work for the association. They kept the thing alive. I've left out some names. E. T. Clark was another who was active in that who was for many years the secretary-manager of the Pacific Northwest Logger's Association, which was one of the two groups that sponsored the Joint Committee on Forest Conservation along with West Coast Lumbermen's Association and who was the first professor of logging engineering at the University of Washington College of Forestry.

ERM: Greeley often times referred to the lumber industry as being a sick industry, and I always got the impression from my talking with him that part of the reason for its sickness was divisions within its own ranks. Regionally and by species group, by market interests, and from many other regional and economic reasons. The Depression, in a sense, and the New Deal and the national government in that period seemed to force a situation which worked to remedy that basic weakness of the industry. It forced a sitting down together and a wrestling with problems which had never been dealt with quite in that way before. Am I right?

WDH: You've covered that in this rhetorical question. You've covered the main things. It all goes back to one word--competition. The forest industry historically is a boom and

47 bust industry. Historically, of course, the principal use of the forest was for lumber, and the success of lumber industry at any one time is the demand for lumber for residential and light commercial construction. This is really the basic indicator of the economy of our country. With the light construction industry in good shape, the whole country was in good shape; when it's bad the whole country is bad, because it involves more people-- the light construction industry directly or indirectly--than any other one single activity in the United States. Starting with the supplies that are funneled into the places where the construction is occurring, all the transportation that gets it there, all the machinations of the merchandising process--of wholesalers, jobbers, retailers, then all the people involved in the building trades, all that takes lumber. You can visualize lumber flowing in through all these channels I'm talking about, to the carpenter and to the man that assembles it on the job.

Then you've got the stuff that comes to the electrician on the job and the stuff that comes to the plumber on the job, and the stuff that comes to the plasterer--you go back to mines, and more transportation and more wholesalers and retailers, the combination of all those things funneling in. It's obvious that when the light construction industry's good, the country's good. When it's bad, the economy's on the rocks. The competition in the sale of lumber was so intense for so long that this industry has literally cannibalized itself. The effect on forestry was that it kept the timber a cheap commodity when you couldn't get much for forest products because of this fierce competition. It was cutthroat competition. People often sold lumber, the history of our country and the economic history of the lumber industry show, for far less than cost of its manufacture and delivery to the point of use. Only because they were making little profit on liquidation of their timber--timber which was cheap--and timber which they had to liquidate. In the early days before there was any consideration that forestry might be an economic thing, the idea of the highest and best use of a forest was to put an end once and for all taxes, risk, and interest, by cutting the most timber in the shortest possible time. All of which had the effect of a dent in the market all the time.

The price of forest products never got up to its true worth in relation to other commodities, which had a less competitive market because the supplies being put on the market were somewhat controlled. Not so in timber. In the first place you had 50,000 entities in the lumber business in this country manufacturing lumber. True, 80 percent of those units maybe only manufactured 20 percent. But that was enough to keep the thing a highly competitive thing. A lot different than in the steel business, for instance, where 75 percent of the steel production came from six or seven companies where they could turn it off and on a little bit despite the working of the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, which partly came into being as a result of the manipulation of prices of two great industries. The units of production were held in so few hands--namely steel and oil. We've never had that situation in our industry. It couldn't possibly develop and our industry is important in more than half the states of the Union. The production of these others, for example, for years oil production was only important in four or five places--nowhere near as wide as it is today. The same way with steel--steel was pretty well concentrated in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and that's it. Steel now of course, is much more diversified. We've got steel production in the western part of the United Sates, insignificant like it is in the Middle West, but it's growing.

48 Then freight rates play an important part. The only problem in the lumber business while I was a kid in this part of the country was the price the manufacturers were able to get for forest products; in the domestic market at least where most of the products were sold. It was what was called underweights because the lumber was shipped at a 2700- pound rate per thousand. The rate was figured out at 1000 feet of lumber weighing 2700 pounds. So if you get the weight down to 2200 pounds you had 500 pounds left than what the rate was figured on--so your profit--because you were selling the lumber for less than cost for manufacturing--was the difference between what the actual freight rate was and the apparent rate from the published figures. That's a hell of a precarious basis for a profit of an industry to beat the freight rate, because the only means of making any return at all is the cost of your whole enterprise. That was never true in steel. Never true in oil; never true in a lot of other commodities.

Somehow, there's been a myth developed in forest history that the forest industry thought of its resources as being an inexhaustible thing because you could always move some place else. Well, you can't convince me that the pioneers in our industry, in this region, or in any other region thought of a forest as being inexhaustible. They knew darn well that there was just so much land in this country and there was just so much that was economic to be harvested because of its location with reference to the market; that they knew damn well, that sometime, somewhere, someone was going to have to grow trees. But they needed to know how to do it, because there were no foresters in this country to advise them. To get the picture, here's two of the founders of our professional society which was only founded sixty years ago. Of the seven men who founded our society in November of 1900, two of them are still alive. This whole thing has happened in one man's lifetime. It only started fifteen years before I was born and two of the men who started it are still going to be present and attend our annual meeting this November in Washington, D.C.

ERM: Hosmer and Hall.

WDH: Hosmer and Hall. That's right. Now what effect the New Deal had in putting the fear of Christ in the lumbermen's hearts that their lands were going to be confiscated because the government was going to try to regulate their forestry practices undoubtedly had some effect upon the industry trying to do something about forestry.

ERM: This, in a sense, is a justification for a two-party system of government.

WDH: Yes, it is. You bet, and as a matter of fact I listened to Walter Lippmann last night when Howard K. Smith was interviewing him. The pattern seemed to become one party in the executive and the other party in the legislature, if maybe that weren't a good thing. Lippmann replied that he thought it might be, and I'm not so sure but what I don't agree with him on that. A little competition in the policy level is just as important as competition in the market places. In one instance it keeps the good products coming at reasonable prices for the consumer, and the other, it keeps the two sides, both of whom are lusting for power, powerless to the extent that in a country as big as ours now we can keep close enough track of them to see to it that what they do is really in the public interest.

49 I don't use that term as many of our politicians do as a fence behind which to hide when I don't want to change my view on something. When I say in the public interest, I mean just that - what's best for most of the people of our country. At any rate, despite the fact that I do believe that the New Deal's drive toward regulation of private forests had an effect certainly upon putting the leaders of our industry in the frame of mind to do something about forestry, and the timing of the tree farm program coincided with just about the peak of that push which of course was shortly turned off because of the war, and efforts were turned for a while to war production above everything. Except in the case of the drive by Lyle Watts and a handful of his associates who still kept beating the tom-toms for federal regulation of private cutting practices all during the war. The thing that really was significant and why the tree farm program in our own region has become, in my opinion, successful as a medium through which to educate people to the opportunities of forestry and more than that, getting them to take advantage of those opportunities and do something constructive about it.

At the same time we started the tree farm program, maybe just an accident of history, we went over the hump in timber demand and supply in the United States and timber began to become for the first time a truly valuable commodity. Hence the economic incentive was there to allow people to make a profit without having to worry about selling in continuously chaotic markets. That's what Colonel Greeley was referring to when he talked about the sick industry. It was an industry that was liquidating itself out of timber fast and furiously to try to get away from this continuous interest and taxes business, and at the same time was cutting its own throat because it was crowding the market place with so goddamm much more production than the consumers demanded that the price consequently had to stay low, and did.

ERM: Let's look at that economic situation that obtained then in 1942, Bill. We were beginning to move into the war years.

WDH: We had really begun in '39.

ERM: There was created a tremendous new market for the product. To what extent do you believe that new demand, created by the war, and followed by the tremendous domestic demand for wood which followed the war set a pattern of continuing rise, or were we just enjoying wood as temporary boom because of these events?

WDH: I think it was partly both. First, just take this region as an example. In 1925, which was thirty-five years ago, the log harvest of this region was used primarily for the manufacture of lumber and shingles. Eighty-five percent of the logs harvested in 1925 were manufactured into lumber and about 7 or 8 percent into shingles. Today, in 1960, we will manufacture the approximately twelve billion feet of timber we'll harvest in this region this year; 60 percent into lumber, 20 percent yearly into plywood, 2 percent into shingles, and 18 percent into pulp.

ERM: Yes, but in 1925 most of what is now going into pulp was going into the burner, wasn't it?

WDH: It wasn't all going into the burner then, but a lot of it was.

50

ERM: A big percentage, though.

WDH: But the biggest share that was being used in 1925 was used for domestic fuel. That was one of the biggest businesses that our industry had in this region thirty-five years ago. We didn't burn oil. I remember as a boy in both Seattle and Portland in the 1920s where slabs were sold to households. A fellow came around with a buzz saw and buzzed it up for you. Your job as a boy was to pack it into the basement, or, if you didn't have a basement, out in back to the woodshed.

GTM: I think that still applied in the 1930s.

WDH: Sure it did. That's one of the mistaken impressions of propagandists about the disuse of raw material of our industry. They always flub-dubbed. They never realized that we had gone through a tremendous transition in our domestic heating and fuel for cooking requirements as compared with sometime back, because we didn't have natural gas in this region until three years ago. What gas we had was manufactured from coal or petroleum and it was relatively high cost. We didn't use until 1940 substantial quantities of oil for heat. Our principal source of fuel for both heating and cooking was wood. Nobody that lived in this country in the 1920s had an electric range for a home. Now 95 percent of the homes cook with electricity or gas.

ERM: In the year 1925 what percentage of that was going into fuel and what percentage of it was going into the burner?

WDH: I would say that 75 percent of the leftovers from the sawmills are in the form of wood now, not sawdust...the sawdust thing didn't build up until about the '30s. However, we had a big outlet for sawdust for domestic fuel. The sawdust and the hogged fuel was used for going into the boilers of the mills to make electricity. All of our mills made their own electricity. They all had electric plants, steam plants, every one of 'em. They'd make up the steam to run their generators, to run their mills, and to dump the surplus power into the public system of the community in which they operated. And that's still true of many of them. But 75 percent of the wood that was left over in the form of slab and trim was sold for domestic fuel.

ERM: In 1925.

WDH: Damn right. Today we're getting the equivalent of a billion and a half board feet log scale in this region for our pulp and board industries from the leftovers from our sawmills and plywood plants. Many of our plants don't have enough left over today to provide their own fuel requirements--so they have to either buy electricity or they buy oil or use natural gas under their own boilers to generate steam. So we've had a tremendous transition in that regard.

We're getting a little bit off the subject here. The field of utilization is another thing I can talk a whole day on. The happy effects, and that's what it was, of the coincidence of the beginning of the Tree Farm Program in 1941, with this change in timber demand/supply, when timber became for the first time a valuable commodity. It gave us

51 the incentive we needed to really sell people the idea of forestry in a big way. Of course, my associates and myself beat ourselves on the chest quite frequently and say, "Well, look what we've done with our Tree Farm Program." But we couldn't have done it, no matter how skillful merchandisers we were, how persuasive we were, if economics hadn't been right.

ERM: If economic factors had been different than they were.

WDH: Right. We'd have been voices crying in the wilderness, if you'll pardon the use of the term. The missionary work had been done beginning in 1928 in this industry by Colonel Greeley. While I've never seen any correspondence on it or talked with anybody it specifically, it was always my opinion that when Colonel Greeley was hired by the leaders of the West Coast lumber industry to head up their association, one of the things was that in addition to leading a big trade association, who was to lead them out of the morass of over-production, destructive lumbering, down the primrose path of a well ordered industry with a future--because it was going to make its own future through utilizing its forestry opportunity on its own land.

In the spring of 1952, when we were trying to get rid of this obstreperous name of the Independent Forestry Organization of the Douglas Fir Industry, Colonel Greeley and I had quite a disagreement before our board. Because the Colonel hung tight to this idea of keeping the term "conservation." I had made the suggestion that we ought to use "association," because we were an industrial forestry association, West Coast Industrial Forestry Association. There was some feeling that that was too long a name, and I agree, and we finally decided in a motion made by Len Forrest of Rayonier, Inc. that henceforth the association would be known as the Industrial Forestry Association. If we wanted to explain the geography of the area we represented we could do it by putting a little map on our stationery. It shows a map of western Washington, western Oregon, and northern California on the stationery. Then we've got a subtitle on our letterhead as you know that says "Serving forest owners, loggers, and wood users throughout the Douglas Fir Region." It's made it a lot easier for us to identify ourselves to the public in that we can now get our corporate name in nearly one line in a newspaper column; whereas before Forest Conservation Committee of Pacific Northwest Forest Industries, or worse in the earlier days, Joint Committee on Forest Conservation, West Coast Lumbermen's Association Pacific Northwest Loggers Association--it took ten lines of type to explain who the hell we were, and we couldn't be effective.

Incidentally, Walter Davenport, who used to have an interesting column in the now defunct Collier's, called, "Forty-Eight States of Mind" kidded us about this. I think Jim Stevens, who was a good friend of his, fed it to him, that when we made this change from Joint Committee to Forest Conservation Committee, he said, "Well, things aren't always what they seem." Just recently in Portland, Oregon, the Joint Committee on Forest Conservation of West Coast Lumbermen's Association Pacific Northwest Loggers Association made it easier for their hello girl who now merely has to answer, "Good morning, this is the Forest Conservation Committee of Pacific Northwest Forest Industries." So, I think you'll agree that Industrial Forestry Association is a lot better-- and it describes what we are; we are an industrial forestry group trying to promote industrial forestry throughout the Douglas-fir region.

52

The Colonel died hard on that one. We were having lunch several years afterwards, and we got discussing it and he smiled and said, "Well, I died hard." That's just what he said. "I always liked the connotation of forest conservation because it planted in the public mind somebody doing something about it." "Well," I said, "it really doesn't matter what we call it Colonel as long as we do it. That's the main thing, because if we do it then we've really got something to talk about." And he agreed, of course. But it was a bitter pill for him for a few minutes.

Colonel Greeley

ERM: Tell us a little bit, Bill, about your own personal relationship with the Colonel.

WDH: I lost my father when I was eleven, and of course a boy needs a father. My mother tried awfully hard to be father and mother to me. Her health wasn't too good. She was out earning our living, really, after my father died because she was left in rather meager circumstances. Being a big kid, going away from home and working in the camps in the summertime and coming back to go to school in the winter, getting out of high school just a few weeks before I was sixteen years of age. I was a pretty footloose and fancy free boy for a while in that I wanted to grab an armload of boxcars and run off to work here and there and look the country over or do something--I'm afraid she had a pretty rough time. So, like any boy who lost his father, who always yearned for one, I always had a tendency, until very recently at least, of attaching myself to a professor, or high school teacher, employer or an associate, who was old enough to be my father, or nearly so, and who would show an interest in me. A very natural tendency for a boy without a father to do, and I don't think when I was a kid doing this, I don't think I understood or appreciated that that's what I was doing, but I was; I know that now.

The Colonel was two years older than my own father, had my father lived, so he was at the right age class, certainly, to be my father. He was the kind of man that any boy would have appreciated having as a father because he was such a fine man. My relationship with him was a lot closer with him than the average employee, and the fact that we were both members of the same profession--our common interest in wanting to work this industry to a forestry basis cemented our relationship and made us very close. I just enjoyed him no end--it was a real experience. After all, a young man in our business, my profession, starting out with no particular background except a little logging camp experience and education, being thrown at an early age in association with Colonel Greeley, I was only twenty-six at the time, it was a rare privilege, really. I don't suppose the Colonel ever considered me his protégée, nor did I ever consider myself his protégée, most people who knew us professionally and those in the industry always thought of me as the Colonel's protégée, which, I suppose in a manner of speaking, I was.

The Colonel had a very interesting campaign on for a long time. Loggers are somewhat given to what city folks think is profane language. When I was younger, I was pretty bad and am not too good yet, in that when I want to say it, I do. When I came home

53 from the war, the Colonel, one day called me in. At that time my office was right next to his. We were located in the Stuart Building in Seattle--before the association had moved its offices to Portland--in late 1945--and said, "Bill, I'm gonna start a little campaign to clean up your speech." Of course, I was kinda taken aback by that-- innocently said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, you've got to cut out this 'god damn' business." That was one of my favorite expressions--my favorite adjective I guess, and he said, "I'm gonna put you on a quota--you're going to be rationed henceforth to six god damns per hour--for every god damn over six, it's gonna cost you two bits." It cost me a fortune in the first month--almost more than my pay. So I made a determined effort to cut it down--I think I did, considerably.

ERM: Did you actually pay off?

WDH: Not really, it was kind of a joke. I kept track of it just to see, because every time I was frowning, of course, he would remind me of it.

The next year in 1946, the Society of American Foresters held its first annual meeting following the war, in Salt Lake City. And Colonel Greeley was then a member of the Council of the Society of American Foresters. Some of us, I among them, during the early '40s, I think probably 1942, persuaded the Colonel to allow us to nominate him for membership on the Council of the Society, notwithstanding the fact that he had been president of it the year I was born. Good soldier that he was, he was responsive to our arguments that he ought to do it, and he did and of course he was elected hands down being one of the better known men in our profession that are elected as large nationally. Of course, as anything he got into, he took it seriously and got in there and tried to weld our professional society into a stronger, better, more productive association.

The Society has the custody of a medal, named after the pioneer German forester who started forestry in British India and who later became the Professor of Forestry at Oxford, Sir William Schlich. The first Schlich medal was awarded to Franklin Roosevelt about 1935 and the next to Gifford Pinchot in 1940. There had only been two, I think, awarded up till that time. There's a Society of American Foresters grant from some British organization to defray the cost of this, and the Society has the full custody of it and can award it to any person that makes a significant contribution to forestry. But I think the only requirement is that you must be English-speaking--so it could be to a British forester or Canadian forester, anyone from the Empire countries and the United States. Greeley, I think, was scheduled in 1946 to be the recipient, but of course the Council had not cut him in because the Council has the decision to make as to whom the medal is to be awarded. Of course, he was a member, but they excluded him from the meetings.

At the dinner, the banquet, where the medal was to be presented to him, Colonel Greeley and some others and my wife and I were about to sit down to the table--there had been a little cocktail party--we all had a drink or two, and the Colonel had already seated himself at our table. Henry Clepper, the executive secretary of the Society came down, and said, "Colonel, you've got to come up to the head table." The Colonel said, "I'm damned sick and tired of sitting at head tables." And he saw Ruth and he looked over and said, "I apologize, Ruth,” and he took out his wallet and threw down a dollar to

54 her. "Here," he said, "that'll give me a little credit." That was so like him you know. He was full of that kind of stuff.

Another time, apropos of this, we were having a meeting of our board upstairs in the board room here on the eighth floor, it was 1952 or 53, and the Colonel was there, of course, because after we separated from West Coast the Colonel was a member of our board up till his death. Something happened where I had to go out of the meeting and someone on the board, Len Forrest, I think it was--he's the one that tells the stories-- asked where Bill had gone and the Colonel said, "He's just gone out to get another basket of 'god damns'!" I had a lot of fun with him on that. He was really serious but he didn't take it to the point where he was mad at me or nagged me or anything like that. It was just a little subtle way of trying to clean up my speech and I think it had a good effect.

ERM: He made you conscious...

WDH: Oh did he, I'll say he did! Of course I used to ask him a lot about his early days in the Forest Service--because everybody in our business is interested in some of the experiences that those pioneers had. Things were a lot different than they had been in my day. You hear a lot of tales about a lot of these things, and you wonder how true they are. When the Colonel was supervisor of the Sierra South National Forest, they had a bunch of Basque sheepherders and they were trespassing all over hell on the national forest. They decided about 1907 to try a trespass case to see if they could establish a court order. The government under the law had the authority to enforce the trespass regulations; I guess they didn't have any laws on trespass, but there was a regulation the secretary of agriculture applied to trespassing. The story that was told about the Colonel not by him, but by others, was that he got up on the range with this fellow, right on the range to show him where the boundary was--they went out and posted all the boundaries to make sure because there was alienated land inside the forest and they had to post these interior boundaries beyond the sign that says "beyond lies national forest land"--so a fellow knew he was getting across the line. He ran into this one fellow who was an English-speaking fellow. They had just published the Use Book in 1907 and set forth the grazing regulations covering use of the national forest, and one section was called the grazing section. The story was in those days that the rangers carried a revolver and the Colonel took his out to tell the fellow what this meant. He was emphasizing and punctuating it with this gun. "This is what I interpreted it to mean." The fellow he was talking to took his gun out and said, "No, I don't understand that way." So I asked him if it really happened. "Hell no," he says, "it was an apocryphal story. I heard it many times myself." They took it to court. You must have got into some of the details on that. They got into the district court in San Francisco and one of the problems that they had was that none of the Basques spoke English. He told me a lot of stories about them. When they were out in the woods and you'd see 'em in town and they'd have these goddamn, high powered corporation lawyers representing 'em and Jesus Christ, these guys had Harvard accents representing 'em and everything else.

He didn't like Schenck.

55 C. A. Schenck

ERM: He didn't like Schenck a bit.

WDH: No. He volunteered to me one night when we were riding from here up to my home to have dinner. We used to have him in our home whenever we could get him, when he was down here overnight because he always enjoyed my wife and she enjoyed him. We were talking about personalities a little bit, I've mentioned a few, some of 'em are still living, I just said to start the conversation, "What about Schenck?" "Well," he said, "I always thought that he overplayed his hand a little bit--that he just over- dramatized things and that he wasn't as good a man as he was made out to be." I covered and said, "Well, he did found this forestry school and turned out a bunch of men, some of whom have been your associates." "Oh yes," he said, "but he was a little bit of a faker." So I told him a few stories that I'd heard about Schenck and what not, some of which he had known about. Of course, I'd had the opportunity of meeting Schenck and talking to him. We had him out here on a trip in 1951, when we dedicated Weyerhaeuser Millicoma Tree Farm.

I was the one that presented the tree farm certificate to the manager of the Weyerhaeuser branch down there. There was a buzzard flying overhead, and Schenck talked of eagles in the sky and all that. Oh, he was very dramatic. He was an old man then, he was eighty-two years of age. Very erect, just like a Prussian officer. I always suspected that the Colonel (I don't know this to be a fact) was a great patriot, and the Colonel didn't think too much of German ways of doing things. When he and I ever got in a conflict, I being of German ancestry, of course, why I had a natural tendency to feel that way but it's tempered by the fact that my mother's Scotch-Irish. So, I'm pretty well balanced on it really. Although with a German name, you're apt to think of yourself as German even though only a quarter of my blood is German. I'm actually a quarter German, a quarter Dane of my father's side. Grandmother Hagenstein was born in Denmark, and I'm Scotch and Irish on my mother's side. My mother's maiden name by the way, was Finigan--odd combination, Finigan and Hagenstein. I always suspected that maybe one of the Colonel's reasons for disliking Schenck was the fact that he had some of the bad characteristics of the Hollywood version of the Prussian officer. Although, he wasn't a Junker at all. Because he came from the south of Germany, didn't he?

ERM: Yes, but he was a typical, aristocratic...

WDH: But he was trained in a Prussian forest school where they got a semi-military education really. He was in the first war. He was a reserve officer in the German Army when he was here in the United States from 1898 to 1910.

ERM: That's one of the reasons why he went back to Europe.

WDH: He was called up wasn't he? He was called up for active service.

GTM: I think they have to go up every so often, don't they?

56 WDH: They do. They have to go up every six years for six months training or something like that. He didn't have a very high rank. He was only an oberleutnant, was all he was, wasn't he?

ERM: I think so.

WDH: Although he may have been a captain or a major when the war was over.

ERM: He was wounded on the Russian front during World War I and that wound put him on the shelf for a while.

WDH: Yes, I knew that. Well, you know, actually from my own conversation with him, and reading his writings, I always felt that here was a man that had a hell of an emotional problem in that there was a man that really had two countries. He loved both Germany and the United States. He really did. He was no faker about this interest in the United States.

ERM: But Schenck was truly a Wagnerian, too--in everything that he said and did he was sailing through the air with the Valkyries.

WDH: The only time I ever really saw him was at the time of this tree farm dedication for a whole day and got to watch him perform closely. When he was kind of the pièce de résistance in the program. He had a tendency to be the super showman all right. He over-dramatized things a little bit.

Well, we all have a little tendency to do that. Some people have more of a flair for it than others--sometimes its necessary to make your point. I got support for timber access roads by dramatizing things with a cartoon and making fun of it with a bunch of people I had at a meeting with in the East one time--and they couldn't see that they thought to make timber access roads was a subsidy to our industry. I just distributed the cartoon, because I had clipped it out and had permission (it was by the Saturday Evening Post), blew it up and reproduced it suitable for framing. The chairman asked me if I was ready to make my usual speech on timber access roads, I just passed it out around the table, and they laughed and passed the resolution I was after. There was no reason for it, just our policy. But that was drama, pure and simple. There weren't any facts; there wasn't anything, just emotion. I was appealing to the best emotion of all, their sense of humor. And it worked. That's something we can't tell them you've got to have.

ERM: They've gotten over any hurt they had.

WDH: Yes.

Wilderness

ERM: I wish you would expound the history of this wilderness situation that's evolved in this country in recent years.

57 WDH: It's a subject I know a lot about, because our own association has been actively opposed to the enactment of any wilderness bill which has been introduced to date before the Congress. I personally have appeared as a witness against two bills and because of the shotgun hearing in 1957--first time they held a hearing--merely submitted a statement by telegraph to the committee. In 1958 the hearing of July 23, in Washington, D.C., I appeared against it and I made the argument that before any action be taken on such a bill, that the hearings be held in the western United States to acquaint the people of the West what was proposed to be done with the lands that were to be included in a blanket wilderness system. I urged that they hold hearings in every state. A number of other organizations and other industries that would be affected by a wilderness bill. They're just the same things--mainly the grazing industry, and oil and gas, and the mining industry, and so on. That fall, four hearings were held, the first one at Bend, Oregon, where I appeared as a witness, opposing the bill--Senator Neuberger conducted the hearings--and then I audited the other three hearings they held that fall-- this was all in November of 1958 at San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Then in March and April of 1959, further hearings were held--the first in Seattle, Washington, where I appeared as a witness opposing the bill and I audited the hearing which was held in Phoenix, Arizona.

Let me make it abundantly clear that I'm in favor of wilderness. I think there's a legitimate place for it. I have enjoyed personally visiting wilderness areas, both ones that are formally established as such in the national forests; ones that are informally established as in the national forests; ones that are informally established as such by there mere fact they haven't built roads to them--in the national parks and in many areas the private lands which at this date have not been developed by road systems. I think that wilderness does and can play an increasingly important part in the outdoor recreational facilities of our nation, adding thereby to our culture, getting a certain kind of person that needs isolation an ability to recharge his batteries, as it were. I think there's some validity to the argument that we need some of them for the study of ecology of plants and animals, as a living laboratory.

The whole question revolves down to just one major point in my opinion and that's this. We know from the trend of the increase of the population of our country since the middle of the century that we're going to have more than 100 million more people in this country before the next century starts. We know that we can't make new land; all the land we're ever going to have with the exception of a little increase made by the meandering of streams and deltas of the Mississippi, we've got all the land we're going to have, so it's limited. We know that as the population of the earth increases we're going to convert more of our land which is now in forests, for example, into living space for people, use it for the facilities that are needed to serve people which is power lines, roads, industrial sites, more agricultural lands, believe it or not, despite our present surpluses, so the forest is going to be converted to more other uses and driven further and further back in the mountains in many western states.

The question is how much, and where should wilderness reservations be, taking into consideration the pressure on land for other uses because of the increase in population. It's purely an economic question. It shouldn't be relegated to the emotional end, which it has been in discussions this far. The people who are the proponents of a blanket

58 wilderness system as envisioned by the legislation that's been pending in the Congress are well-intentioned, honest, for the most part reasonable people, but they're a little bit shy of considering everything that must be taken into account in deciding what's the best use of a specific piece of land that belongs to the public from now on.

Forestry, of course, is only one of the activities of man that would be affected adversely by restricting its practice in areas that are now forests that might be set aside as wilderness. Water development is probably more important. We're sitting right now in the only region that isn't faced with a critical water problem, because we're in a region of relatively high rainfall. The rest of the West is, in varying degrees, entirely dependent upon water development to take care of the population now, to say nothing about any further increase. They're scratching the barrel every place for it. Minerals, everyone knows, in order to keep a strong economy and to have adequate national defense, you've got to continually explore prospects, spend millions of dollars looking for mineral deposits and for gas and oil. In many parts of the mountain states, for example, grazing is an extremely important thing for the domestic economy. A lot of the summer range for sheep and cattle is in some of the high country. This is the only good range they've got in the drier parts of the year. They've got to use it for a period of sixty to seventy days, which is all the use they get out of it, but it's essential. Recreation for 300 million people has got to be easily accessible if people are going to get it.

These public lands belong to all the people in the United States. There's a moral obligation on the part of all the people in the United States to recognize to the extent that the public domain was withdrawn from any region for the establishment, for example of a national forest, which is the principal area we're talking about--the principal federal ownership in the areas that I'm most concerned with anyway--the forestry areas. The principal federal ownership, however, the desert grazing lands under Bureau of Land Management. The national forests are the principal timber lands in the western United States excluding Alaska. We have to leave Alaska out of this for a minute. All of the people of the country have got a moral obligation to see to it because these lands couldn't go on the tax rolls when they were withdrawn from national forests to recognize that the sale of resources from those national forests are important to the maintenance of local government. To many of these counties in the western states, national forest land is an important part of the area. Well, in fact it runs up to 60, 70, 80 percent of the land surface of the county is in national forests. You couldn't maintain a county government on the basis of the private taxpayer--who is a small part of the area-- so for the 25 percent receipts they get from the sale of timber and grass--from those areas, is damned important to help the local government. Oftentimes, it's the bulk of the county revenue for roads and schools, public welfare and all the other functions of local government.

The problem is where, and how much. We're dealing with lands that have not been explored for the minerals potential, lands which are largely not surveyed, lands which have not had water development analysis completed on them, lands much of which that will grow commercial crops and timber, and mostly all of which below timber line at least, is susceptible for multiple use with anywhere from two or more uses of the same land compatibly. Then another consideration. Nature itself in the western states has set aside twenty-five million acres of wilderness which is the high mountain meadows, the

59 alpine forests and the areas above timber line--and no act of Congress or of any other human ordinance can change it one iota. The Old Man set it aside himself. That's the way she is. With the possible exception of a few mountain meadows that might be needed for grazing. A little development might be found where the necessity for crossing a high range with transmission lines--but there isn't any need to develop the areas with roads--most of 'em.

ERM: Twenty-five million acres...?

WDH: Twenty-five million acres...yes...which is a pretty significant amount.

ERM: How much a part of that is what you might call wilderness area?

WDH: It's all wilderness--

ERM: ...usable wilderness--something that's inaccessible even to the more hardy wilderness addict, isn't it?

WDH: No. No, it's the area that goes over rocks, the tops of the mountains, mountain meadows and the alpine forests. It's the area through which they go to climb it--or wherever you want to go in the wilderness. Up in the high country, where you get the beautiful mountains and glaciers, alpine lakes, meadows, and what not--that's where you want to go. But what they want now, they want to go down the mountainside and clear into the major river valleys and take all the land because they don't want to go through any cutover land on their way getting up to these areas--which seems to me they're a little bit short-sighted. Some people call them selfish--I don't know whether they'd go for that or not--they call us selfish for wanting to practice forestry.

I think maybe they are selfish in wanting to prohibit the practices of forestry on land that we may need, that I'm sure we need, in my lifetime, as a source of timber to sustain the needs for wood of our rising population. Rather than create a wilderness system which would blanket in a lot of unsurveyed, unknown, undeveloped land, it's a lot better I think to let the Forest Service continue doing exactly what it is doing. Making these studies of these areas, setting forth a proposal for a wilderness boundary of an area within a national forest, call a public hearing and let everybody that has a viewpoint on any side and there's fifty sides to this question state his views and then exercise the wisdom of Solomon and draw the boundary that's going to be the most beneficial for the most people.

It's a fact that the Forest Service itself says that 1 percent of the recreational use of the national forests is in the wilderness areas. There already are fourteen million acres of wilderness, wild and primitive areas. They want to set aside 8 percent of the national forests for 1 percent of the recreational users--that just seems a little bit out of balance on the face of it. I don't know how much out of balance--nobody else does because no one has made an accurate study of this thing. Suffice it to say that anybody who recommends any kind of land use withdrawal for a special purpose--and that's what it is--wilderness is one purpose--they can call it multiple use all they want to, but it isn't, its one purpose. If you can't protect that forest that's in there if it's forest you're in--well,

60 all these areas aren't forest areas. If you can't protect these forests against the natural enemies of insects and fire because you haven't any roads in it then you're not going to have any watershed it's going to be lost when the timber cover is destroyed. Certainly an approach which will study these areas for all their possible contributions to mankind with decisions made by impartial technicians leave a question that this is where the boundary ought to go in our best judgment based upon our studies and surveys that's where it ought to be. But the main reason that forest industries and other natural resources industries have opposed this bill is because any blanket wilderness system which would set aside lands, about which little or nothing is known, can do nothing but adversely affect the economy of hundreds of western communities that depend upon these federal lands for their economy.

ERM: How much land actually is involved out here in the West, Bill, in this by individual states and by individual counties?

WDH: I'm going to refer to something to give you the answer to that one, if I may. At the hearing in Bend, Oregon, in November 1958, I presented the statistical picture of what we thought the Wilderness Bill, as then written, would mean. It shows that the proportion of federal lands in the western states which would be reserved by the bill was as follows: Arizona, 11.8 percent (mind you these are just the federal lands) California, 12.2 percent, Colorado, 5.5 percent, Idaho 8.9 percent, Montana 14.8 percent, Nevada, 5.5 percent, New Mexico 4.9 percent, Oregon 4.2 percent, Utah 1.6 percent, Washington, 16.9 percent. We're the highest of the eleven western states, including Alaska and Hawaii and Wyoming 15.8 percent--or 8.6 percent of all the federal land in these eleven states--but that doesn't tell the complete picture.

One thing I learned after filing this with the committee as part of testimony is that in a state like Arizona, for example, only 25 percent of the total land area of that space is in private ownership--federal is half, but the other 25 percent belongs to the Indians and the State itself. When you take 11.8 percent of the federal land in a state where only 25 percent of the total is federally owned it is going to have an adverse effect upon the local taxpayer--because you're not going to develop any resources on these wilderness areas, or manage them, and consequently the local counties are not going to share in the receipts that might come from the sale of timber for example or grass, minerals, gas and oil. Gas and oil have been discovered in Arizona. They're very alive to that down there now, for the first time--just in the last year. My testimony on this bill in Bend, Oregon, in 1958 includes a lot of information which shows that this thing means.

Now you asked specifically with reference to how much land. The proponents of the bill have said--no one knows really what they're talking about because this is a blanket proposal--that it would encompass fifty-five million acres of federal land about which fifty million acres of that would be in the western states including Alaska. There's a little bit in the state of Maine and some in northern Minnesota in the Quetico-Superior area and in a few places, perhaps in the Appalachian Mountains, but the bulk of it is in the public land states of the West. It is my opinion that Congress is not going to enact this bill because of the strenuous opposition that the people who are working hard to develop the western economy have taken. When you get the combined opposition of all the natural resources industries, it seems rather unlikely that Congress will fail to listen

61 to the plea that here is a watch and wait, stop before you leap, look before you leap, piece of legislation. I think that's exactly what happened after four years and an attempt to boom this thing of out committee, it still never got out of the Senate committee.

ERM: Who are the most articulate supporters of the Wilderness Bill?

WDH: First of all, the Wilderness Society, which is an organization of citizens that was developed many years ago. Colonel Greeley was a member of it by the way. They believe that wilderness must be protected by law, and they're determined in their drive to enact a bill to effect this. At the present time the wilderness areas in the national forests, for example, are administrative withdrawals at the pleasure of the secretary of agriculture who can, at any time, when circumstances permit, modify the boundaries, either by extending them or contracting them. These people that are proponents feel that once you get a road in that area, it no longer has a chance of ever being wilderness. The Sierra Club is another articulate group that is in favor of it. Of course they've got a lot of other outdoor organizations like the National Audubon Society, The Izaak Walton League, The National Wildlife Federation, the Institute of Wildlife Management, the Nature Conservancy, and any number of organizations that--women's clubs, the Garden Club, the American Association of the University of Women, and others like that.

Not many of those people really except in the wilderness societies and the Sierra Club really know what they're talking about. The rest of these people are propagandized by slick-leaf magazines in four colors very expensively presented. It's an emotional issue. Emotionally, you'd have a hard time preventing its enactment, but when you get down to the cold hard facts which are appealing to responsible members of the United States Senate, Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, and the same can be said for the House and its Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. It is my opinion at this date at least that the majority of the members of both those committees are adverse to reporting out any bill which would create a blanket wilderness system. Now that doesn't mean we're not going to have wilderness. The Forest Service is continuing to examine areas that it's had in the temporary classification of primitive area for many years which was a classification developed by the Forest Service to put an area on ice as it were, during the process of studying it to see where it was this boundary ought to go. Under the regulations, the secretary of agriculture, once such studies are made and the Forest Service recommends that primitive areas be reclassified, if it's over 100,000 acres in extent, it's called thereafter a wilderness area and if it's under a 100,000 but more than 5,000, a wild area, is going on right along. The Forest Service has one in Wyoming that the recommendation is in now, and they have another in the State of Washington-- Glacier Peak Area--that they are in the process of making recommendations on.

ERM: All part of the Service's multiple use concept of management of the land.

WDH: I suppose that's true generally, although this is stretching the term multiple use a little bit in that while it may be maintained that single use can be a part of multiple use, you can get into a hell of an argument on whether it really is.

ERM: One of the multiple uses of the four on national forest land taken as whole.

62 WDH: Oh, I think that's right.

ERM: If it's one of the multiple uses in that sense.

WDH: That's correct. One of the other aspects of the thing is this: in the case of the national parks, there is no regulation of the secretary of the interior under which wilderness areas are set aside in the national parks. The Park Service creates wilderness areas or maintains them I should say, they don't create them, the Old Man created them, by simply not building any roads. Now you get into a problem there between the wilderness enthusiasts and the average guy that wants accessible recreation; a good case to the point that's close by is the Olympic National Park. Here we have a national park of 898,000 acres, most of which was created out of what was formerly national forest. It's an area of high rainfall and heavy timber growth--the west side of the area would be one of the most productive timber growing areas in the world, and the public that owns that park can see very little of it, because they can't get to it, except by foot or by horseback. While I've enjoyed walking across the peninsula and a lot of my friends have, the average person who lives in the Olympic Peninsula or Puget Sound or anywhere else in the United States is never going to see that park--unless he flies over it in an airplane--because if he comes from the East Coast, for example, he isn't going to have the time to walk through it, nor is he going to have the money to hire a pack string to take him through it.

The proponents of the bill say those are the screwiest arguments--that not only a handful of people can use wilderness--everybody can use it. A lot of people who don't use it, or can't use it, or don't want to use it, are just as comfortable knowing it might be there. That may be true, but if we've got the problem, as we have, of providing additional jobs for more people and providing commodities for more people, so that we can maintain what we like to brag about as our "American standard of living," then multiple use, as I visualize it, not the way we were discussing a minute ago, but multiple use wherein every area that is susceptible, not every area, but most areas, that are susceptible of more than one use--we're gonna have to study out what they are and work it out on a compatible basis. In the long run, that's what the pressure of population will force us to do, regardless of the enactment of legislation setting aside a blanket wilderness area.

One of the arguments made in the hearing at Salt Lake City in 1958 would be of interest to you. A representative of the Montana State Game and Fish Commission said that a million-acre wilderness area, it's actually 950,000 acres I believe, in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area in the Flathead National Forest of western Montana, wasn't big enough because it was the natural habitat of the grizzly bear and the grizzly bear was a highly mobile animal so they had to have more land up there. Well, in Seattle, in March 1959, I cited that in my testimony against the bill. I cited that testimony and said that I thought it was fine to maintain a habitat for the grizzly bear, but most people I knew didn't care much about grizzly bears. In fact, the only time I ever saw one, I hoped then that everything I'd read about them, namely that they couldn't climb trees, was true--because I went up a tree damn quick. Now obviously it was true or I wouldn't be here against the bill.

ERM: That's all of the questions I have Bill, thank you very much.

63

SP63 (October 1992)

Regulation Controversy

Harold K. Steen: What are your recollections about the regulation controversy?

William D. Hagenstein: The regulation controversy was one that really was started about 1920 when Mr. Pinchot led a group of people in the Forest Service and a few members of Congress into wanting to regulate private forestry in the United States by having a federal law passed that would give the Forest Service the authority to do it. It was during the period when Colonel Greeley was the chief of the Forest Service. Colonel Greeley had different views, so nothing much happened for a while. There was lots of bitter debate about the thing, lots of recriminations, nasty things said to people, more heat than light generated on the problems.

Greeley was able to get a very able United States senator, by the name of McNary, to get a select committee on reforestation authorized by the Senate. When that was done by a resolution of the Senate, Charles McNary was appointed chairman of the committee. Republicans, of course, were in control of the Senate, and McNary was a Republican. Other members of that committee were four very prominent senators of the day. There was Duncan Fletcher from Florida, George Moses from New Hampshire, Jim Couzens from Michigan, and Pat Harrison from Mississippi. They held hearings all over the United States in 1923. Those hearings led to the enactment of the Clarke- McNary Act a year later in 1924. Greeley's philosophy was that if you want to get people to do a better job, first you've got to run smoke out of the woods to make it feasible to practice forestry in the country. The second thing is that you've got to encourage people to reforest the land when they harvest timber, but you can't get them to do it until the smoke's run out of the woods first. In other words, it's an educational proposition.

Education was Greeley's great forte, and Pinchot's was regulation. That's where the two of them differed. It's a strange thing, I always thought, that Greeley always was a great admirer of Pinchot's being a spiritual leader of forestry in the US, but Pinchot was a small man in one respect. In his book for example, his autobiography Breaking New Ground Greeley’s not even mentioned.

HKS: That's right.

WDH: Not even mentioned. You know, it's a strange thing. Yet in Colonel Greeley's book, Forests and Men, he pays significant tribute to Pinchot's leadership.

HKS: Did Greeley comment on that? Because Breaking New Ground came out in '46 or '47, so Greeley had a chance to read it. I mean, Pinchot was dead before Forests and Men came out.

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WDH: The Colonel read it. Sure.

HKS: Did he comment?

WDH: No, I never remember him talking about that. It's an interesting thing, he always referred to Pinchot as "Governor Pinchot," always called him "Governor Pinchot."

HKS: Breaking New Ground ends in 1910. And Greeley was just getting started. He was out in Region I, ready for the Big Blowup.

WDH: He was the district forester at Missoula.

HKS: Yes. You got out of forestry school about 1937, right?

WDH: '38.

HKS: There was another regulation controversy brewing. You went to work for Greeley and a trade association. Was this a key issue?

Early Years

WDH: I went to work for Colonel Greeley and the West Coast Lumbermen's Association as their forester for the state of Washington on the sixth day of June 1941. That was just after I had been to school here in Durham for a year.

HKS: So, you didn't go to work immediately for Greeley.

WDH: No. In 1938 I worked for the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine in forest insect work on four forests-Modoc, Shasta, Lassen, and Plumas national forests in California for about six months. Then I worked for the Eagle Logging Company in Skagit County, Washington, where I was hired as their logging engineer. After I had been there about four and a half months, I was made logging superintendent. In the year 1939, I worked entirely for that logging company. Then in the spring of 1940, I applied for a scholarship at New York State College of Forestry and also one at Duke. I was awarded one at Duke. I needed a job, a temporary job, for a few months. Dean Winkenwerder got me a job with Herb Plumb on the Snoqualmie National Forest where I was a foreman of a CCC camp at North Bend for about four and a half months.

HKS: Do you remember the name of the camp?

WDH: It was Camp F-22, which is the one that is now called Camp Wascowitz. It was just east of the town, on the south side of the highway. I worked in that camp until late August of 1940. Then my wife and I were married on the second of September 1940, which was Labor Day. The next day we took off and came to Durham. We were here until late May of 1941. When I finished up my work and was awarded an MF degree, we went home. I went to work for the West Coast Lumbermen's Association.

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HKS: Pappy Pearce told me a story about you, sometime in the early '60s when I was in grad school at Washington. Greeley came to Seattle, talked to him; he wanted a graduate in logging engineering that knew how to write. He recommended you. Did Pearce ever tell you that story?

WDH: Pearce was my major professor, of course. I knew him real well and worked with him on a lot of things. No, he never told me. He was a very knowledgeable guy, but he was a hell of a poor professor. He couldn't talk worth a damn. His lectures were poor. I almost insulted Dave Thorud when he asked me to be the chairman of the committee of alumni to raise the money for the Pearce Scholarship. I told Thorud and the girl that was working for them then as their panhandler that Pearce was the poorest professor I ever had. And they looked AHH! [both laugh] But I said, "The reason that I'm willing to take the job to help raise the money for it is that every professional school needs one man on its faculty who is interested enough in the students that he tries to help them get employment." I said, "Pearce fulfilled that function in our faculty for many, many years, and he did it very well." And I said, "I've always had a warm spot in my heart for him because of that and have forgiven him for being such a lousy prof." [laughs]

HKS: How about that.

WDH: We used to kid him. Of course, my class had a lot of older men in it. The average age of my class at graduation was about twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old. I was one of the younger members actually. A lot of them had logging experience. We were as rough on Pearce in the '30s because of our logging experience as the GIs were on the young profs after the war. The GIs were tough. The guys that had been in combat were rough as hell on professors.

HKS: I had a cousin who, I think, was in your class: Chuck Kimball. Chuck never worked in forestry.

WDH: It was a tough time to get out of school. Forestry, you know, really hadn't gotten underway in our region, then.

HKS: So you started with association in '41. The war was about to break out, so attention shifted a lot. Regulation was becoming an issue about the time you went to work for Greeley.

WDH: You bet it was an issue. Greeley had had a big debate. For example an article was published in the Seattle P.I., one by Greeley and one by Henry Wallace, who was the secretary of agriculture. They were pretty hard-hitting articles about the subject. Greeley's philosophy always was that we needed teachers in the woods and not policemen, if we are going to get people to practice forestry.

When I was first hired by the association--of course I didn't work directly for the Colonel. I worked for the forester for the association, a fellow named Warren Tilton who was also a University of Washington forestry graduate, class of '32. Tilton just

66 gave me one instruction when I went to work for him. He said, "Get on your bicycle and go out in the woods and jerk the seals off every fire tool box. Where you find tools that are not adequate to fight a fire with, right in front of the logging superintendent, throw them away and tell him to get some decent ones." I spent the first summer doing a lot of that, going out with the logging superintendents in camps all over western Washington. I went to four hundred operations in one year. I threw away two or three thousand tools, because we were trying to get these fellows to really comply with the state law, do a better job of protection.

At the same time, when we were doing that, we were getting interested in getting into the nursery business. On the fifteenth of September 1941, I surveyed the land at Nisqually, which we bought and started our first tree nursery. It became a big business with us.

HKS: You were out throwing away tools. Was the state inspecting?

WDH: Oh, sure, but the state inspectors, who get paid $180 a month and when the snowballs came in the fall, they hit them in the tail with a paycheck. They were part- time workers, a lot of them. They were afraid of these logging superintendents. My job was to go out there and stiffen their backs. I spent a lot of time with those wardens throughout the whole nineteen counties in western Washington until I went off in the war. Gosh, some of them became my best friends and some of our best teachers in forestry, because I really imbued those guys with the idea that that was their job not just to get guys to comply with the law, but to really prevent fire, so we could start growing trees. It really worked.

HKS: You came back after the war, back to the association, and the regulation issue was starting to heat up again as attention turned to civilian issues.

WDH: As a matter of fact, it didn't. It didn't really get delayed during the war. There was still the propaganda going on continually. Once Lyle Watts became the chief of the Forest Service; Lyle Watts was a regulationist.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: When Watts became the chief of the Forest Service, which I think was in 1943, he immediately began to continue despite the fact that the government was urging the industry to get off its tail and go out and produce wood for the war. Watts was still trying to build up support in the Congress and with the public for regulation. That made for some pretty hard feelings. They had an assistant chief of the Forest Service by the name of Kotok. He was the assistant chief in charge of State and Private Forestry. He was a propagandist of the first water for regulation. That made a lot of people in our industry mad, because here we were being asked by the War Production Board to get out there and really produce the timber for the war, which we did.

The great record that our industry hung up during World War II in our region really is pretty phenomenal when you consider that there was a terrible shortage of manpower, because the war industries like Boeing and the shipyards drained off a lot of the loggers.

67 You had terrible shortages of equipment. It was very hard to get equipment of all kinds. Tires for example were very difficult to get. Everything was rationed very strictly, and it was hard even to get enough food for the logging camps. I took a man from the Department of Agriculture, who was a nutrition expert, out to some of the logging camps for a week in 1942 to see what they needed in the way of additional food to keep these men on the job, so they could get the logs out for the war. His report said "They've got to feed them more peanut butter." [laughs] Of course, we never would've got logs if that's all they could feed them.

There was a series of congressional hearings during the war, they were House hearings conducted in part by a young congressman by the name of Kefauver, long before he was a senator. Congressman Jackson from Washington who was a freshman in the Congress was chairman of the subcommittee which included a Republican congressman named Stevenson. They held a hearing in Seattle, it would be in the summer of 1943, trying to see how they could get enough manpower in the woods to get logs for the war. One of the labor pains men--the Lumbermen's Industrial Relations Committee which represented the industry in negotiations with the unions--we always called them the Labor Pains Boys. His name was Fitzgerald--and Fitzgerald had a glass eye--and he winked it at the congressmen when he was testifying. Keith Kefauver asked him, "Now, tell me, Mr. Fitzgerald, how can we get the men back into the woods and have enough men there to really get the logs out for the war?" Fitzgerald winked his glass eye at Keith Kefauver and said, "Well, Sir, you might try moving the timber to town." [both laugh] The audience laughed. It was really funny.

But despite the fact that the industry was cooperating very well with the government in producing for the war, the Forest Service never gave up because of Watts' philosophy and leadership. Kotok was his minion for going out and doing the job. You can look back and see their literature. You can see their press releases and all that stuff during that period. That made everybody mad as hell, because it was silly. That should have been put on the back burner until the war was over at least and then see what happened.

Meantime, we were getting people to do a hell of a lot better job of protection against fire in our region. As we started the nursery, we only got a handful of companies at the very beginning to be interested in buying trees and planting them. But we got the major landowners involved. Right away we got Weyerhaeuser, Crown-Zellerbach, Simpson Logging Company, and St. Paul-Tacoma Lumber Company. They were the four big ones in Washington. Then, in Oregon, we got Booth Kelly Lumber Company and C. D. Johnson Lumber Corporation, and of course Crown-Zellerbach was down there. Weyerhaeuser had land, but they hadn't developed their timberlands down there very much then; their operations were mostly in the state of Washington. The regulation bogey was going on and on and on and on. It was a dumb thing.

HKS: It kept going until theoretically '52 or '53 when McArdle officially called the dogs off.

WDH: He wasn't very much interested in it. He thought the national forests ought to start playing their part and contribute to the needs of the country. He knew that if they

68 wasted their energy trying to get control of the private lands, they wouldn't be doing the job on their own lands.

HKS: How much skepticism was there on the association side that the Forest Service really had changed its mind? It seems to me that the atmosphere continued through the '50s with a certain amount of suspicion or ill-at-ease about what the Forest Service was really up to. The next thing I want to talk about is Timber Resources Review. It seems to me that the regulation issue colored that, because of concerns on industry's side about what the Forest Service really meant by this study.

WDH: There's no question that the bad feelings that were engendered by the old regulation bogey to begin with carried on for a long time, particularly among the older men. The older men that were in on it for many, many years had strong feelings against these fellows in the Forest Service promoting that. The war added to that. Here these guys were out there tearing their outfits apart, over-cutting their own timber to produce for the war, and here you had the national forests sitting the war out. It's a very interesting statistic we published in a book called More Timber in 1946, that during the war our region produced 45 billion feet of logs and only 2.7 billion of them came from the national forests. It was a lousy record, but of course the reason for it was, they were almost completely inaccessible at the time. They just weren't opened up. There were only a few areas where there had been enough transportation development that allowed them to really put anywhere near a reasonable allowable cut on the market. During that period, of course, the private people were over-cutting their forests substantially to meet the needs of the war. So that engendered a strong feeling on the part of the older men in our industry.

You take men like the leaders of our industry, fellows like Clyde Martin who was Weyerhaeuser's chief forester and who was a pioneer forester in the United States. He felt very strongly that the Forest Service was doing the country a bad turn by continuing this business of trying to get regulation. Of course all the major land-owning companies didn't want somebody in the government coming in and telling them how to run their businesses, particularly when we arrived at a period, which we did, in the late 1940s the minute the war was over, with the great demand for products. We'd gone over the hump in our timber demand/supply in the United States, and timber was beginning to become a valuable resource. As Colonel Greeley was wont to say continually when anybody would question him about it, "Men conserve things of value." The minute something becomes valuable, you can't prevent people from practicing forestry. They're going to want to do it inherently, and they're going to do it. And he said, "We take care of this protection thing and give these fellows some assurance that if they're going to spend money on reforestation, that we're not going to burn it up before harvest day comes around, they're going to have something to harvest." But he said, "We're going to encourage them to do it." And, of course, the minute we got the protection house in order, the reforestation just went like this. [gestures]

HKS: How important was the other part of the equation? The fear of taxes somewhere down the road during the rotation. Fire clearly, but we hear fire and taxes were the problem. You're mentioning fire all the time.

69 WDH: Well, that was the first thing. It was the fear of fire that discouraged everybody from putting money into forestry. Not only the private people, hell, it discouraged the states, it discouraged the federal government. As long as the Congress kept realizing we were burning twenty-five or thirty million acres of forest land a year in the United States, the Congress wasn't going to appropriate a lot of money for reforestation. There was no way you could make the case for it, but once you got the protection house in order, then people could be interested in wanting to finance reforestation.

HKS: Have we covered regulation enough?

Timber Resources Review

WDH: You could cover it a long, long time. I know a lot about it. I was right in the middle of it in all those years. I wrote a lot about it, I spoke a lot about it, I read a lot about it, I talked with a hell of a lot of people about it. The TRR thing, of course, Ed Crafts was in charge of it and Ed Crafts was a regulationist. Lyle Watts made him assistant chief. Ed Crafts made a speech at Yale University at the forest school up there, about sometime in 1948 or '9, in which he laid out the regulation thing again. It kind of threw oil on the fire. It really flamed up. Right after that came the TRR, which I think was about 1952, and the TRR looked like it was an attempt to make the case that the private people weren't doing anywhere near an adequate job, and the only way that it would happen is if the federal government were authorized to regulate private forestry.

TRR was viewed with great suspicion by all of us. We worked on it. I got together a group of about fifteen of the best professional foresters in our industry in the region, and we really took the Forest Service on on the criteria for determining what is productivity of the land. We even got Ed Crafts out in the woods. We got a whole bunch of them. They got a guy from Region 5. We got a fellow from Region 1, a fellow from Region 6, and two or three experiment station directors. We got them all out in the woods, to go out there and look at their productivity criteria that they were developing, to show them. One thing that Ed Crafts never understood was what the "trend toward normality" meant with respect to understocked stands as they approach rotation age which is that they increase in the amount of stocking. He never understood that. A couple of the experiment station directors didn't understand it either. It's amazing. We were out there in the woods, talking it out, and these fellows didn't understand it. So we took them on at that, and they softened the TRR a little bit because of it.

I can tell you this, we had some pretty strong exchanges of letters on it. McArdle and I had a couple of hot ones on it in which I cited all the things they'd said they were going to do and what they didn't do and then asked "how come?" He wrote back and said, "I could ask you the same thing, how come." He said, "Your letter really isn't addressed to the regional forester." I had written it to the regional forester, because it was our region. He said, "Your letter was really addressed to me." He responded that way. I think Crafts wrote the response, McArdle just signed it, but it was pretty hot. But nothing much came of it. I mean, by that time we were getting to the point where we had all the major private land owners in the United States beginning to do an effective job of forestry. The Tree Farm Program, which the industry used for its public relations about what it

70 was doing in forestry, attracted a lot of attention. The Forest Service kind of let the regulation thing kind of just slowly die.

In the meantime, they were beginning to gear up to practice better forestry on the national forests, and we were helping them do it. You know, I spent more than thirty years working my can off getting appropriations for those guys, for roads, for research, for reforestation, for protection, and all that sort of thing. That put me in a very good position to be very critical of them when they didn't perform. Once I had helped them get the tools to allow them to do it, it left me in a more unique position than almost any private individual in the United States to kick the hell out of them, and I did it on every occasion they had it coming. And a few times that they thought that they didn't have it coming. [laughs]

HKS: NFPA hired John Zivnuska to critique the TRR.

WDH: Right.

HKS: What was the coordination between the various associations, and who was the master player? Was it NFPA coordinating it nationally?

WDH: They tried to. Of course AFPI was involved in it a little bit too. Tinker, who ran the American Paper and Pulp Association as it was called then, was involved in it. They tried to coordinate all this stuff through the Forest Industries Council, but the Forest Industries Council had no staff. It was a conglomerate of the industry groups that were working together. They had several committees. But it was a handful of us in the major associations that worked with NFPA's forestry committee to work on this thing, and that's what we did. I've forgotten now, but Alf Nelson must have been the forester for NFPA at the time.

HKS: Sounds familiar.

WDH: Alf Nelson was there during that period. He hired Ralph Hodges, and Ralph took his place in time and later became the manager. We had an effective bunch of high grade, professional foresters in the associations. There was Ernie Kolbe in the Western Pine Association, Howard Bennett in the Appalachian Hardwoods, and Virgil Cothren in Southern Pine, Bill Hammerle who had been forester for Southern Pine and then later worked for the American Pulpwood Association and myself. We worked very closely together in all that sort of stuff. For example when they were discussing the criteria for TRR, the Forest Service would have a meeting within a region, and we'd go there and we'd discuss it with them. We'd immediately let the people in these other regions know exactly what they'd done there, and they would reciprocate. We were well coordinated nationally on it despite the fact that we were all overworked with our small staffs. We didn't have that many people involved. Our staff was very small. I had three or four helpers during that period. Later, of course, we built our staff up to where we had a lot more people, but in those days, well, I worked eighty hours a week for twenty-five years. There was no way I could have done my job without it.

71 HKS: I recall a statement from somebody--I don't know if it was from the industry side or the Forest Service side--that industry pressure prevented the Forest Service from having a policy section in TRR. It turned out to be an inventory, but it didn't interpret it. It didn't say, "therefore we need to do thus and so." Was that an issue?

WDH: I don't really recall that, Pete, whether that was a big issue or not. I've got my files on that stuff. I've never destroyed any of that stuff. It's all intact. When the association moved out of the building where I am yet, I got it all. These kids that succeeded our bunch, they're not interested in the past; they're living today and in the future. They would have thrown all that damned stuff away if I hadn't taken it. What I didn't take went to the Oregon Historical Society.

HKS: Good.

WDH: So we kept it intact. I spent thirty-five years building up the best file of that kind that exists in the Northwest and the finest private forestry library. The Historical Society's got it all except for the part that I took. All the policy stuff that I was interested in, I took all that stuff and kept it all, because the Industrial Forestry Association allowed me to do it.

HKS: Ed Heacox told me a story.

WDH: He worked very closely with me on that.

HKS: There was a meeting of the Forest Service and industry in San Francisco.

WDH: I was there.

HKS: McArdle came through, made a statement and said, "Time’s up. I've got to leave." No questions or answers. That doesn't fit the image I have of McArdle as a human being.

WDH: Well, he was under some pressure, but he did do that there. Ed was right. That's what happened. We had taken him on there. We were a little bit rough on him I'm sure, but he just "I'm going to pick up my marbles and go on home."

HKS: Okay.

WDH: He'd had enough of it. We didn't just have industry foresters there at that meeting. We took a handful of industry principals with us to show him the significance of what we felt about the whole thing. It was a knock down drag out session. We took fellows like Ed Stamm of Crown-Zellerbach. Ed Stamm was, you know, a fellow in our society, a mustang in forestry. He was a civil engineer by profession, but he was a good forestry leader in our region. He led Crown-Zellerbach into wonderful forestry until the nuts, the board of directors of that company, gave it away to Sir James Goldsmith. He stole it from them really. Seven hundred thousand acres of some of the most productive timberland which had had good forestry practiced on it for more than three decades. He got it for a song. He sold it all to a company called Hanson Trust. They own all the

72 former Crown-Zellerbach lands. They've got a company called Cavenham, but it belongs to Hanson Trust. I'm a stockholder in it. It's a British company. Sir James Goldsmith traded the Crown-Zellerbach lands--now I don't know whether that includes the property at Bogalusa or not, I'm not sure, but the lands in the fir region for example and the lands in eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, the old Biles Colman property that they bought, that Crown had bought. That all belongs to Cavenham now, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hanson Trust. Hanson is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

HKS: I thought James River bought some Crown-Zellerbach.

WDH: They bought the plants. They didn't get any land. Any land that James River has in our region, it's very little, is bottomland that they bought in the Columbia River and some of its tributaries. They bought bottomlands, and they're planting cottonwood in it. They've got huge cottonwood that they've established. Other than that, they're living entirely on chips they buy for the mills they bought.

James River sold the West Linn Plant to Simpson and owns the plants at Wauna, Oregon, and Camas, Washington. The other Crown-Zellerbach plants in Washington, for example the one at Port Townsend now belongs to a German company. I don't know what the name of it is now, but Crown sold that long before Goldsmith bought it. And they sold the plant at Port Angeles to the Japanese. Fiberboard also sold out to Daishowa Paper Company. They're operating that plant which makes telephone directory paper and newsprint. Simpson is now operating the West Linn Plant. Simpson has become very big in paper in our region. They bought the St. Regis Plant at Tacoma, the old Tacoma Kraft plant.

Multiple Use Act

HKS: The Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act--that wasn't particularly controversial except from the environmental side about wilderness. What's your recollection of opposition? It took four years to get it passed.

WDH: I guess the opposition was in the nature of general suspicion that everything they were trying to do had a tendency to be trended toward the regulation issue or toward anything that would deduct from the productivity of the national forests by using the land for other than forestry. There was a natural suspicion that that's what they wanted to do, because most people in our industry thought that the Forest Service was following the trend of the times.

HKS: Looking back on those times, do you think your suspicions were valid?

WDH: It may have been a hold over from the regulation issue in part, but it was somewhat valid in that when the first wilderness bill was introduced for example in 1956 the proponents of it wanted a blanket wilderness package that would take fifty- five million acres of lands that had never been examined as to what their highest, best use for society was. People said, "Hell, you know, there's nothing wrong with wilderness," and everybody in the industry was in favor of wilderness, but where?

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HKS: That's right.

WDH: Are we going to do it to the detriment of the economy of these communities that have been living for nearly a century in the shadow of the promise that Congress inherently gave when it created the national forests in 1891 and established their purpose in 1897? When communities developed around these forests, they were going to be available to sustain them to the extent that it's possible to do that. Suddenly there's a welshing on the mortgage in effect by saying, "That ain't so. We're going to start drawing it in, and it's going to restrict what might be available for the use of the resources."

HKS: That trend has continued. It's dramatic today.

WDH: It's dramatic, so dramatic, that I say publicly now when I get the chance, and I went before the God Squad and did so in February of this year, that the United States government is perpetrating a fraud upon a hundred thousand families that live in Washington or Oregon whose jobs, whose homes, whose schools, whose communities are in jeopardy now, because suddenly the government is saying, "We're not going to practice forestry any more in the national forests." That's, in effect, what they're doing under the aegis of the Endangered Species Act in protecting a species that's so-called threatened, now officially by the Fish and Wildlife Service, the northern spotted owl. And now extended to the marbled murrelet. I don't know what's wrong with our government, or I don't know what's wrong with the politicians that we elect, but there's nobody, there's nobody, Pete, in the Congress of the United States today from Washington or Oregon that's got guts enough to take these guys on and straighten them out. We're getting no leadership from the executive branch of the government on it. We're getting none out of the Department of Agriculture. And I think the secretary of the interior has been trying a little bit, but he's got his own Fish and Wildlife Service that's kicking the hell out of him privately.

HKS: I'm interviewing Max Peterson. He commented on the same issue, but put a little different slant on it. I'd like to have you react to what Max says is happening with the spotted owl. He says, "It's one of those rare instances where national values are going to be applied only locally. It's a cheap environmental vote for all of Congress across the country."

WDH: Every Congressman from New Jersey can get nothing but votes for it. [laughs]

HKS: So that's what's happening, and it really has nothing to do with the issue. It worked that way where everybody in Congress wants to have an environmental vote; here's one they can have.

WDH: Let me give you an analogy to it. Eisenhower was elected in 1952. In July of 1953, I picked a poor month for it, it was the hottest weather they ever had in Washington, D.C., in any of their weather records. It got up to a hundred and seven degrees and the humidity was right up to the saturation point all the time.

74 I spent the whole month of July visiting every single member of the Appropriations Committee both in the House and the Senate, and that's a lot of them, to talk about the need for national forest road money. I started with the Bureau of the Budget as it was called then, and the director of the budget was Joe Dodge, a banker from Detroit that Eisenhower had appointed, and I got his blessing on it. Then I went and talked to the Appropriations Committee members to appropriate enough money to put an adequate road system into the national forests, so they could really get up to their allowable cut.

The reaction I got from congressmen from states like New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, was "What's in it for me? What's in it for me if I support you fellows," because there are going to be five states that are going to get most of the money where the heavy national forests are; Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana are going to get the most of it. "Well," I said, "what's in it for you is that you live in the areas where people are the consumers that are going need the housing and all the other products that come out of the forest, and the government is the principal forest owner in these regions out there. If we make these government forests accessible for use and for management and for protection, it's going to come down to the benefit of your constituents who are the principal consumers of the country of the things that come from those forests." And believe it or not, I got some of them to support us.

We got the authorization raised in the Public Works Committee, where the authorization legislation had to originate. We got the authorization raised from twelve and a half million dollars to a hundred and seventy million dollars a year. Not over night. It was over a period of several years. Once we got that authorization, which is the hunting license, up to that significant level, then the next step is to get the Appropriations Committees to appropriate the money. We started to get some substantial increases. This was a local issue that we made national. Max is right, now, you got what he says about the owl. But this is one that was on the constructive side.

Northwest Forest Pest Action Council

HKS: Characterize the Northwest Forest Pest Action Council.

WDH: It's an interesting thing. There's an interesting history written on it by a deceased man now, but a former professor at Reed College by the name of Charles McKinley.

HKS: Charles McKinley. He wrote a big book, Uncle Sam in the Pacific Northwest.

WDH: He also wrote on the Northwest Forest Pest Action Council. He got most of the information out of my files. He spent weeks in our office, and I made everything available to him. Every letter, every publication, it was all available. He was hostile to us, even though he did a good job on that thing. He came in with the idea that he thought industry was trying to run this thing. The Northwest Forest Pest Action Council was organized by Hoss Andrews who was the regional forester in Portland in 1948, and he invited a handful of us. He invited the two state foresters. He invited Kolbe of the Western Pine Association, myself, and a representative for three or four of the major land owning companies like Weyerhaeuser and Crown-Zellerbach, which were the two

75 biggest ones in our region, to get together to decide how we could handle the problem that was being posed in eastern Oregon principally then by the spruce budworm. There was a very significant infestation of spruce budworm, an inappropriately named species because it was mostly in Douglas-fir and white fir in the east side.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: We got together in the library in Portland. It wasn't called the Northwest Forest Pest Action Council, we called it the Spruce Budworm Action Committee; that was its original name. We immediately got to work deciding how we were going to find out the extent of the infestation and the experiment station and the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine's Division of Forest Insect Investigations. It was not part of the Forest Service yet. The Forest Insect Division furnished airplanes and spotters. Several of the companies and the states of Oregon and Washington did the same thing. We went out and completely mapped the infestation area. Then we decided what we were going to do about it. DDT was available. We started a big spraying program. We sprayed over a period of about from 1949 until about 1952. We sprayed about five million acres. The most significant thing that we did, besides knocking the infestation down significantly, we had a two hundred thousand acre infestation in the Willamette National Forest on the west side where the budworm had never been found before to anybody's knowledge. We completely drove it out of the west side. We drove it out of the Douglas-fir region. There wasn't any of it left after we got through with one spraying there.

We had a tragedy in one of those years. The Spruce Budworm Action Committee was the one that coordinated all this effort, and we all worked together on it. I did the work mainly in the Congress, getting them the money to do it. In 1949 I appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee when they'd knocked it down on the House side. We had a very able United States senator from Oregon, Guy Cordon, who in those days was on the Appropriations Committee. McKeller of Tennessee was the chairman. The two witnesses before the committee on this subject were Chris Granger, who was an assistant chief of the Forest Service, and myself. We got the appropriation substantially restored by the Senate, and then they held it in the conference. So we were able to go ahead with our spraying program. But the next year, I believe it was 1950, about twelve or thirteen pilots got killed. We put it out for bids, and we gave the spraying contracts to the low bidders. We had guys that really weren't safe doing it.

We did a hell of a good job. By the way, Ernie Kolbe was elected chairman of the Spruce Budworm Action Committee because the infestation was principally in the pine region. He was chairman of the Pest Action Council continually until he retired. Then we kept the thing alive. After the spruce budworm became moot as a problem, other things became to show up. In 1951 we had a hurricane that blew down about ten billion feet of timber in the region, and we changed the name of the committee from the Spruce Budworm Action Committee to the Northwest Forest Pest Action Council. We had a Douglas-fir beetle subcommittee of which I was the chairman, because it was on our side of the hill. So when it was a Douglas-fir regional problem, why, I was generally made the chairman. If it were a pine region problem, Kolbe. But Kolbe stayed the chairman of the full council. We worked with the Forest Service, BLM, and with the industry and with the state forestry departments. We began to make a yearly insect

76 detection survey of the whole area in the two states, all the lands. At a very low cost, you know, because the companies furnished planes and observers and the government did some, the states did some. We did a hell of a good job finding out where the problems were.

Then in the Douglas-fir beetle committee of which I was the chairman in the fir region, our job was to encourage people to go out there and salvage the blowdown, to prevent the beetle population building up. The Columbus Day storm occurred thirty years ago this month.

HKS: I was in Portland at that time.

WDH: I was in the Seattle airport when it happened. We were having a drink with the mayor of Portland, and we had to spend the night at a motel there. They had canceled all the planes. Monday morning we had a meeting of the executive committee of the Pest Action Council. Kolbe called it at my suggestion. I said, "We need to get hot on this thing right now." We organized the Timber Disaster Committee. He named me the chairman of it. Our job was to coordinate the detection and the salvage, and we did a hell of a job. We had seventeen billion feet of timber blow down in that storm in five hours.

Late in October of 1962 the president of the United States sent John Carver, who was an assistant secretary of the interior, out to Portland to hold an emergency meeting to determine what the problem was. We got the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management and the two state forestry departments into that thing. I was the principal witness in it for the Pest Action Council as chairman of the Timber Disaster Committee. We made the case of what needed to be done: relax the regulations, extend sales that are in green timber to let people move into the salvage, get the salvage sales on the market, allow temporary rights of way where you're in negotiation and in controversy on the exchange of rights of way and all that sort of thing, particularly the BLM with their checkerboard land pattern throughout the whole Willamette Valley. We did one hell of a job. That Pest Action Council was an effective working group.

When this fellow Robbins wrote a book about cooperative forestry, which I reviewed for the Oregon Historical Quarterly, he never mentioned the Pest Action Council. I criticized him for that in my review. The book was supposed to be about cooperation.

HKS: That's right.

WDH: Here was one of the most cooperative things that ever occurred. There was no animosity by anybody on the regulation issue or any of these controversial things. Here our job was, we wanted to save the resource, and we got together like I never saw any group ever do in the history of the country. The Northwest Forest Pest Action Council history is a subject that would be a damn good book for somebody. Now McKinley started it, you know, but there's a hell of a lot more to it than what he did on it.

HKS: You and the association records would have a major part of that stuff.

77 WDH: I've got it all intact. You bet. None of it's ever been frittered away. My own personal feeling is that it's one of the highlights of forestry in our region, what we accomplished with it, because it was good. It was a regional forester of the Forest Service who was the right kind of a guy to start a thing like that. He was the right personality.

HKS: Herb Stone?

WDH: No, no. This was Hoss Andrews. Herb cooperated with us when he was the regional forester. But you know what's happened to it now? Some regional forester, the last two or three, Torrence maybe, I don't know who it was, killed it and let it die. Boy, if it were in business now, it would help these guys in this terrible problem they've got in northeastern Oregon right now, because they've got the budworm again.

Also, when the Pest Action Council was still very active, we had this big tussock moth infestation in eastern Oregon. This guy Ruckelshaus was the head of EPA there at the time, and he wasn't going to let us use DDT, so we went to the Congress and we got Judge Rarick, who was the chairman of the subcommittee on forests of the House agriculture committee, to hold a hearing. I testified as the representative of the Pest Action Council. I remember him, "Off the record, "he says, "Mr. Hagenstein, are you against the tussock moth?" I says, "I certainly am, Mr. Chairman." He says, "Next witness please." [both laugh] He was having fun with us.

But in those hearings that were held, we made the case that we needed DDT to do this. They were going to legislate so Ruckelshaus turned around and ran the other way and let us use DDT to get after it. But the only thing wrong with it, Pete, it was two years too late; the damage had been done to the timber.

HKS: There're a lot of threads to this story.

WDH: There are.

HKS: Let's go back to Silent Spring. You were talking about the ban on DDT, and it comes out of Rachel Carson's book.

WDH: Oh sure. Silent Spring. She did it to us. [chuckles]

HKS: Would you like to comment on this? The impact?

WDH: The impact was very disastrous really from the standpoint of insect control, because DDT in small quantities, you know, mixed in oil, miscible oil of some kind, didn't do much harm really to the environment. The evidence didn't show that we did. Once we had a fish kill, because a guy made a mistake. It was the tank truck that spilled. It wasn't the airplane's doing. Tank truck spilled a lot of insecticide into a creek. He went across a bridge or something and something happened, the bridge collapsed. It was an overloaded truck. The bridge wasn't adequate for it, and a whole tank load of this miscible oil and DDT got into the stream and it killed a lot of fish. But, by and large, there never was much evidence found that it did very much damage.

78

HKS: Was Silent Spring interpreted correctly? Do you think there was an overreaction?

WDH: Oh, there was an overreaction of course. It was publicized as widely as it was by the people who were against pesticides of any kind. Then the eggshell business-- pelicans, eagles, bald eagles and all that sort of thing. It wasn't long before the case could be made that no politician had guts enough to stand up to. It's too bad, because, having spent part of my life in the tropics where everybody suffers from malaria, DDT was a godsend to the tropical parts of the world, because it took care of the mosquitoes. When I worked in the Solomon Islands, people would say, "These people are all lazy." Hell, they weren't lazy, they were sick. They were sick all the time. They were born sick, because they're bitten continually by these Anopheles mosquitoes that spread the malaria. And DDT was a godsend to the people there, and they still use it in some places, but we don't allow it anymore. It's illegal.

It's reiterating a little bit of what I said a while ago, Pete, but I think it's a crime that the Pest Action Council doesn't exist anymore.

HKS: That's strange, because President Reagan made cooperation and partnerships very fashionable.

WDH: Yes.

HKS: You'd think that things like that would boom now, rather than be dropped.

WDH: I think our problem in our region was that we had too many regional foresters in too short a time.

HKS: That could be.

WDH: We had Schlapfer. We had Torrence. We had Worthington. And now Butruille, and now he's gone. Stone was there for about fifteen, eighteen years. He was there long enough to get acquainted with the problems and all that. Stone was cooperative with the Pest Action Council in every respect, and he had good men on his staff. There were some very able foresters in the regional office of the Forest Service--Walter Lund, for example, who was the assistant regional forester in charge of timber management for many years. He was a guy that believed in forestry. He wanted to practice it. When we had a problem in pest control, he was cooperative in every way. We never had any problems with him. Same way with the guys in fire. The Forest Service adopted a new term: pest management. Oh Christ, we weren't in favor of pest management. We were against pests. [both laugh] We wanted to eradicate them, not manage them.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: It's like the term wildland management, you don't manage wildland. Hell, you can't protect it if there aren't any roads in it.

HKS: Sure.

79

WDH: It's a poor term really. That kind of terminology which is pandering a little bit to people on the outside that don't understand what we're really up to. The government's got a little tendency to use terms like that to pander, but that doesn't help you do a job. Those terms turn off people like myself that really want to see forestry practiced intensely wherever it's possible to do it. I'd like to see a regional forester, the new fellow that's there now. When I get home from this trip, I'm going to go and visit with him about the Pest Action Council, because I'm concerned about that stuff on the east side. Our problem over there is we got so damn many dead trees that if we get a continuation of this drought period we're in and we get severe lightening storms, we're going to burn that whole god damn country up. You know, it's just a tinderbox.

HKS: It goes over into Region 1.

WDH: Sure it does. It's the same stuff that happened in Yellowstone Park. Let me just tell you a little story about Yellowstone. In October of 1987, on the thirtieth day of October, we'd been to the SAF meeting in Minneapolis, and we were driving home. We had planned to go down to Snake River on the way home through southern Idaho. I said, "Why, let's go through Yellowstone. It's nice weather." So we bought picnicking materials. We went up and had a picnic at Lewis Lake which is about eight thousand feet elevation. Nobody was there. While we were having lunch, I looked around three hundred and sixty degrees and I said to me wife, "I can't count them that accurately, but I'm looking at ten thousand dead lodgepole pines here." Eighty-seven was a dry year too, and I said, "If we get another dry year like this one and they get lightning fires, this whole thing is going to burn up." Well, I couldn't have been more prophetic, because in 1988 that's what happened to it.

HKS: That's right.

WDH: And in 1990, we went through the park just to look at it. Have you been through there since the fire?

HKS: No.

WDH: It would make you sick, because a third of it is nothing but snags, a third of it. Their policy was "let it burn."

HKS: That's right.

WDH: They let it burn too long. They built themselves a firestorm that nobody could control. The only thing that was going to control it was the end of the fuel or the end of the weather. It's a disgrace really what happened to them in there.

We've got the same kind of a situation in northeastern Oregon right now. They're not being as energetic as they need to be in the salvage, to go in there and salvage that stuff. Over in central Oregon, down in the Deschutes National Forest for example, and the western part of the Ochoco, but particularly the Deschutes, that portion that lies southeast of Bend, a lot of lodgepole in that country and the mountain pine beetle really

80 got in there. It's over-mature, and the beetle really got in there and cleaned it up. The Forest Service has begun to do a pretty good job of salvage in there, but they were five years too late in doing it. They sat on their tail for five years and let it continually build up. When you've got over-mature lodgepole and a significant population of Dendroctonus monticolae and a continuation of drought which is favorable to further build up of the population--and these fellows know that, they understand that. I mean, they've got some good forest entomologists that know this stuff, who know it very well. You need to go in there and do an energetic job to salvage that stuff and get it the hell out of there. They haven't done it, and they've got one hell of a fire hazard over there because of it. We lost a lot of timber that should have been used.

HKS: I think your SAF presidency coincides with the enactment of the Wilderness Act. I'm not blaming you or praising you for that.

WDH: [laughs] I was elected president in 1965. So I served from '66 to '69. Those were the years I served.

HKS: Okay.

Wilderness

WDH: The Wilderness Act was passed in September of 1964.

HKS: That's correct. Let's talk about the Wilderness Act. That was controversial for eight years, and you must have made a lot of speeches about that.

WDH: In 1957 when the first hearing was held by the Senate committee, for some reason we weren't able to go. I submitted a letter suggesting that rather than just holding hearings in Washington, D.C., they ought to hold them in the states in which the wilderness areas were proposed to give the locals a chance to make known their views. In July of 1958 I testified before the Senate Interior Committee on it and made the pitch for holding western field hearings in the states that were effected. One of the men who had testified at that hearing was a middle-aged, big, rugged man with scuffed cow boots, big hat--he didn't wear it like they do in restaurants when they eat now--which he put down on the chair alongside of him. He looked up at the chairman who was Senator Murray of Montana and says, "Mr. Chairman, my name is G. R. Jack. I'm from Grass Range, Montana, and I'm the president of the American National Cattlemen's Association, and we represent the twenty-three state associations that are affiliated with us and a hundred and sixteen thousand individual cattlemen in the United States. We think you ought to take this legislation to the people in the West and let them make known their views." So, I said to myself, "What the hell are we doing in these things by ourselves when we've got these cowboys who are so many and who are not the least bit bashful about making their views known?" On the way home from that hearing in Washington, I stopped in Denver and got acquainted with Radford Hall, who was then the executive vice president of the American National Cattlemen's Association as it was called then. I'd heard about him, never met him. I said, "Why don't we get together and

81 organize the people in the western United States into a group where we can take these guys on and make some sense out of this legislation."

At the time the legislation was calling for the establishment of a blanket wilderness system, including fifty-five million acres of lands mostly in the western United States, hardly any of which, Pete, had ever been inventoried as to what their resources were and what their highest and best uses to society were. It didn't make sense. What we needed was legislation that would set up some hoops through which candidate areas would have to jump. Once they were able to jump those hoops, then they could go into the wilderness system, and it wasn't going to be detrimental to most of the people of the United States and still establish a lot of wilderness, maybe twenty, thirty million acres of it.

He liked the idea, so I went home and I went to my board of directors and I said, "I'd like to be authorized to take on the job of organizing a group throughout the whole western United States which would include the cowboys, the sheepherders, the irrigators, the miners, the oil and gas people, the public land county officials, the major chambers of commerce, and our industry into some kind of a resource group to take on these fellows to really make a decent piece of legislation out of this proposal." And my board said, "Fly at it." So I got busy on the telephone first. I got in touch with the National Wool Growers Association whose headquarters were in Salt Lake City. I called Bill Welch with the National Reclamation Association in Washington, D.C. I called the chamber of commerce in Portland where I was a member--I was the chairman, I guess, about that time on their forestry committee--and I asked him the names of the people in cities like Salt Lake City and San Francisco and Los Angeles, Spokane, Seattle. And I called all those fellows. I got in touch with the Western Oil and Gas Association in Los Angeles. They put me in touch with the Rocky Mountain Oil and Gas Association and another oil association in the Southwest and one in North Dakota. I got in touch with the irrigation people in California which are well-organized because of the use of so much water for irrigated agriculture. I got in touch with the Farm Bureau. I got in touch with the American Mining Congress in Washington, D.C.

Within a month, we held a meeting in Denver at which we had the representatives of more than a hundred organizations from fourteen states. We organized what we called the Resources Development Council. Never had a letterhead, we just typed it. Never had any funds. We elected Radford Hall, the executive of the Cattlemen's Association, as the chairman, and I was the secretary. I'd built up the mailing list and put it all on addressograph plates. We had on that list every local sheep association, every state's got one; every cattlemen's association; the local mining associations of which there were some, there wasn't one in every state, but there was one in Utah, one in Spokane that covered Idaho and Washington, one in California and so on. We got some public land county officials from states like Wyoming and Nevada and Oregon and New Mexico. Same from the oil and gas groups and all that. What we set out to do was to make certain that the pressure was brought by each of them upon their local members on the interior committee, both in the House and the Senate, to hold western hearings.

It was July when I went to the first hearing and got the idea to do this. It was in September when I got permission by my board to go ahead. And by November that

82 year, when field hearings were called by the Senate Interior Committee--at Bend, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Albuquerque--we loaded those hearings with cowboys and sheepherders and miners and oil and gas people and irrigators and public land county officials like nobody ever saw before.

HKS: The environmentalists must have been loaded up too.

WDH: Not as loaded as we were.

HKS: Okay.

WDH: Nowhere near as many. Zahniser and I got well acquainted, because he was going to all the hearings. I went to all the hearings too. I testified at the one in Bend, but I went and audited all the rest of them, because I was helping organize all these fellows.

HKS: How big a group? You've mentioned a lot of different individuals.

WDH: The mailing list ended up about three hundred and fifty people all together. We had a big mailing list. When the hearings were held and the committees were beginning to consider in their own sessions, and after the hearings, the legislation. We kept getting the different drafts of things that were around, and we sent them out to all these people. We'd ask the people to get specifically on the backs of their members on the Interior Committee. The guys from New Mexico, if Anderson was a member of the committee which he was, we'd ask the boys there to get on his back. So local people from their own state, their own constituents were putting the pressure on these guys. We were making the case all the way through that you needed to have inventories of these lands, you needed to have hearings that were held locally, you needed to give consideration to the county governments whose receipts would be affected because of the sharing of receipts from the sale of timber and minerals and what not from the public lands, you'd have to give the governor of a state that was affected where a proposal was made a chance too.

By the time we got through after seven years, in which we continued this thing, we got the people to turn out continuously. We got well acquainted with key members of the congressional committees that were on our side. In the Senate, for example, the key members of the committee were Senator O'Mahoney, a Democrat from Wyoming; Senator Allott, a Republican from Colorado. He was in the Senate twelve years. He was a lawyer by profession from Lamar, Colorado. Senator O'Mahoney was a newspaper man, a Boston Irishman, who went for his health to Wyoming and was a senior member of the Senate for a long time. When I first got acquainted with Senator O'Mahoney he'd been felled by a stroke. He was in a wheelchair. God, he was a hell of a guy. Mike Manatos was his administrative assistant who later was in the White House with Johnson. He was a Greek boy from Cheyenne. Mike Manatos said, "I want you to come in and talk to Senator O'Mahoney." I went in there and he put out his good hand. I've kind of forgotten, I think he was paralyzed on the right side, because he put out his left hand and I shook it. He was a bald headed, Boston Irishman with these sparkling blue eyes. He said, "Nice to meet you, son. I guess you think of me as being a New Dealer," which I thought was a funny way to greet a man when you met him. [both laugh] I sort

83 of swallowed and I said, "Why, yes, I do, senator." "Well, " he said, "I want you to get one thing god damn straight. I'm not as far as Wyoming is concerned." [both laugh] I loved him for it.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: But he took these guys on. He took Zahniser on all the time. He wrote them some of the hottest letters I ever saw in my life.

HKS: So you were able to change the structure of the bill itself.

WDH: We got the blanket system idea abandoned. We set up the hoops, and when the legislation, Pete, was finally passed this whole bunch supported it. We were able to amend it in such a way to make it a palpable bill, that if a candidate area could go through these hoops it ought to be a wilderness area and it wouldn't be detrimental to the economy of the country. It would be a good thing for everybody. But of course the environmentalists never accepted it. The only thing wrong with the good legislation that was finally passed, the Congress of the United States has continually raped it ever since. They put all kinds of land into wilderness that doesn't deserve to be there because of the pressures that they're responding to. It's a popular thing to do. Everybody wants to say, "Well, I helped get that wilderness area. That's why you ought to re-elect me."

HKS: How did you feel about RARE I and RARE II? It was inventorying the land in effect.

WDH: RARE I and RARE II were a waste of everybody's time. You know, this is Rupert Cutler. I wrote quite a letter to our board after I had heard him testify, because he sounded like he was reasonable about this stuff. Then he turned around in two weeks and went the other way. He wanted to put more and more of the roadless areas into wilderness. I debated him at the SAF meeting in Albuquerque in 1977. In the debate I gave him holy hell. There was a fire in the Los Padres national forests in a wilderness area called the Ventana Wilderness Area.

HKS: I know. I was living in Santa Cruz at that time just across Monterey Bay from the fire.

WDH: You were right there practically. Rupert Cutler was assistant secretary of agriculture at the time, so he was the guy that the secretary of agriculture would seek for counsel to see whether he ought to use retardant dropping planes and bulldozers and mechanical equipment in the wilderness area to fight the fire. They didn't make the decision to use mechanical equipment for eight days, and every day the fire got ten thousand acres bigger until it finally burned up the whole god damned watershed.

HKS: We had so much smoke fifty miles away in Santa Cruz, you couldn't tell the color of the traffic lights.

WDH: I'm sure of it. It was a very bad fire. "So where did you get all your information about this" Cutler asked. "Well," I said, "I got it from the press. I've got clippings from

84 the San Francisco Chronicle, from the Seattle P.I., the Portland Oregonian." I had them all there. I had them with me. "Well," he says, "you don't believe the press on things like that, do you?" I says, "Hell, Mr. Cutler, the press could only get the information on the acres burned over from the Forest Service information officers that were handing it out to them. They're not going to go out there and fly airplanes and photograph the area and have somebody planimetric measure the damn thing in an office." Everybody laughed.

I had a very interesting quotation from Aristotle. He wrote a great book two hundred years before Christ called Politics, and you ought to read it if you haven't. I read it once, and I'm going to read it again, because there's a lot of interesting stuff in it. He makes the point all the way through that the whole idea of the city-state in Greece was that the city-state depended upon the rural people to feed them, but they wouldn't give them anything. They kept them in kind of economic bondage. They'd give them just enough bait to have the food supplies keep coming to the city. So I mentioned this and made the analogy to the study of lands by RARE II and all this sort of thing. In the process I had some statistics too, and somebody shouted, "Where did you get those statistics?" John McGuire, who was sitting in the audience, spoke up and said, "He probably got them from Aristotle." [both laugh] Everybody howled. I laughed too. I laughed louder than anyone in the audience. John still kids me about that. He says, "You got any statistics from Aristotle?" [laughs] I was disillusioned with Cutler terribly on that thing. He was a bad influence on forestry in the United States, in my opinion.

One last thing I'd like to say about wilderness. I made a terrible mistake when the Wilderness Bill was over. I let the Resources Development Council disappear. I should have kept it going, because later you had all kinds of people that tried to emulate things like that, like the Sagebrush Rebellion, which was headed in the same direction. You've got some fellows doing it right now, because of the Endangered Species Act. You have people that are organizing groups like that now. I had the addresses and the people. Of course the personalities have changed now because what we're talking about was thirty- five years ago, when I started all that. I should have kept it up, because I really had a strong organization developed. We never spent any money on it. I don't suppose that our association spent five thousand dollars on the whole thing, over a period of seven to eight years.

HKS: That's amazing.

WDH: My time, of course, but we didn't keep books on anything like that. I mean, out- of-pocket money for additional postage and printing and phone calls and all that sort of thing. Of course in those days things weren't as expensive as they are now either.

HKS: No. That's for sure.

WDH: But it was a good idea. It was a wonderful experience for a kid from the creek that had never done anything like that in his life to take on something like that, originate it and go do it. It was a very interesting educational experience in practical politics for me.

85 SAF Presidency

HKS: Tell the story of how you got involved in SAF and wound up being its president.

WDH: I don't know how I got to be president, but I joined the Society the minute I was eligible in 1938, when I was graduated from college. I was a member of course of the Puget Sound Section which is my home section. I was working in California when I joined, but I was affiliated with the Puget Sound Section, because that was my home area and I hoped to go back there to work, which in a short time I did. I was an active member, participated in the section meetings, and I went to the first national annual meeting in 1946 after the war. In 1947 I was appointed associate editor of the Journal of Forestry by Shirley Allen who was then the president of the society. He was a prof at the University of Michigan.

HKS: Who was editor?

WDH: Hardy Shirley, New York State College of Forestry. I was appointed associate editor of private forestry, because everybody in private industry was objecting that practically all the stuff in the Journal was experiment station material.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: And a lot of algebra and arithmetic and statistics and stuff like that. Most people weren't much interested in it. A lot of people said they never read the Journal, never took it out of the cover, and that sort of thing. So my job was to encourage private foresters to write. Well, it was a hard thing to do. Most of them didn't want to write. [chuckles] Most of them couldn't or wouldn't, so I proselytized all kinds of people throughout the whole country, not just our region, but fellows in the South and the Lake States, Northeast, California, in Canada, things that I saw that I knew were of interest and helped many of those fellows write things. I'd write a letter and suggest that they write a story about what I saw on their operations. And I'd say, "If you want some help, I'll help you do it." So many times these fellows would write something, and it needed a lot of attention, so I'd do editorial work on it and submit it. As associate editor I'd send it to the Journal, and many times they'd publish it. But I had a hard time. I was seven years on the editorial board, and in that period I was probably successful in getting maybe twenty-five articles. That's not very many for that length of time, but it was a hell of a lot more than had been in that field ever until that time.

HKS: In the context of the Journal and its readability, what do you think of the Journal in the last couple of years? It's made a very dramatic shift in approach.

WDH: Yes, it has.

HKS: Is that good or bad do you think?

WDH: Oh, I don't know. I'm not a good critic of things like that, style and what not. I find difficult to read now, for example. I think the Journal is still easier to read, but American Forests I don't care much for anymore the way they're

86 presenting stuff. I guess maybe I don't like the editorial policy there, more than anything else. Sampson kind of wants to outdo the Sierra Club in some ways, it seems like. I was an honorary vice-president of the American Forestry Association for many years, and they did away with them all this year--which I think's a good thing. I don't think honorary vice-presidents are worth a damn anyway. But he's made every one of them mad. George Weyerhaeuser and I were the only two in the Northwest, and they dropped us all off and never notified us. They never even wrote a letter and said "We're going to discontinue this."

HKS: Okay, you're associate editor of the Journal of Forestry.

WDH: That of course widened my acquaintance in the Society through that experience, not only in people but geographically as well, because I was going after other parts of the country than just where I worked. Then in 1946 I was elected secretary-treasurer of the Puget Sound Section, and I did something they'd never done before. I published a membership list and I categorized the people whether they were a forest consultant, logging engineer, silviculturist, or what not. We had about two hundred and fifty members. I spent a lot of time on it. I gave them a hell of a good list. They kept it up for years after that. In recent years they haven't done it. But it made a great hit, and somebody in our own section sent them to other sections of the country, and I got letters from guys all over saying "Good idea," "Get me a copy of it," and "How do you go about doing it?" and all that sort of thing. The other sections were interested.

Executive Vice President, WLLA

WDH: Then I quit the association on December 1, 1947. I quit the association and I went to Canada. I moved to Vancouver, bought a home up there.

HKS: I didn't know that.

WDH: Well, I did. I was getting ready for a much better job than they had for me. I was working for Warren Tilton. Warren and I were in the war together, by the way. We were in the Solomon Islands together. I came back six months ahead of him. I was acting in his place until he came back, and he was the head forester. I was just the forester for Washington. But I was also in charge of the nursery in Nisqually. But I quit in December 1, 1947, and I went to work for the Powell River Company as their chief forester in British Columbia, and working for a hell of a fine guy. One of the finest men I ever knew, John Liersch, who was a UBC graduate, but also had a master’s degree from the University of Washington. For a time, before he worked for Powell River, he was the dean of the faculty of forestry at the University of British Columbia for a year or so. He was a very able guy. He's deceased now. One of the finest men I ever knew.

I went up there to go to work as chief forester for that big company. They owned twenty billion feet of timber, by the way, when I went to work for them. They had that much under contract or license, twenty billion feet. Big plant. Well, they had the biggest newsprint plant in western North America, and they furnished the newsprint for 50 percent of all the newspapers published in the western United States and Alberta and

87 British Columbia and Australia at that time. It produced about six hundred thousand tons of newsprint a year, which is a huge quantity. Big accounts were Los Angeles Times,-.

HKS: Who bought them?

WDH: They were merged with MacMillan-Bloedel, and they're part of it now.

HKS: Right.

WDH: The Powell River Company was the Brooks and Scanlon families, you know, from Minneapolis, that had the mill in Bend, Oregon.

Twenty-three days after I went there, on the twenty-third day of December 1947, Warren Tilton died of a heart attack. He was forty-six years old. I was thirty-two. Nobody could have had the job, his job, until I turned it down. The board of directors of the West Coast Lumbermen's Association told Hal Simpson, the manager, "Go get Hagenstein and bring him back." So in early January of 1948 Hal Simpson called me on the phone and asked me if I were interested in coming back. I said I'd be interested in talking about it, so I made a date to meet him on a Saturday in our office in Seattle. West Coast offices were important then, and we had a branch office in Seattle where I had worked when I quit to go to Canada. So I met him there, and we talked about it, and I said, "Well, I have to go home and talk to my wife about it." We'd gone to Canada as immigrants, gone through the Ellis Island procedure. We had a home in Vancouver. There was currency control. You couldn't even get your money out of the country. You had to get permission from the government to bring it out. They had foreign exchange control at the time. I made up my mind and I came back. I only worked up there ninety days. On the first of March 1948 I came back to be the head forester for the West Coast. We owned a home in Seattle, we owned a home in Vancouver, and I had to have a place to live in Portland. I learned about high finance that year, I'll tell you.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: I never left the Association because I was disinterested in the job. By the time I was thirty-two years of age I had a hell of a lot more experience than most men that age. I was very experienced in our field. I'd been in protection work, I'd been a logger, been a logging superintendent, been a logging engineer, been in charge of the lumbering in the South Pacific during the war. I had one hell of a lot of experience for a man that young. I came back, but I'm glad I did, because I made the right decision to come back. I was adapted to association work. It gave me a chance to grow professionally. I had much more freedom than any association man in this country, because I worked my can off for them, and they gave me the freedom. I had the right to go anyplace I wanted, do anything I wanted to do. I never got paid very well. We never had that kind of money. I never had a decent salary really until the last four or five years. The last four or five years they got ashamed of themselves and they raised my salary very substantially every year. They gave me five thousand dollar raises a year.

HKS: Wow.

88

WDH: For about four years in a row, and that raised me up to a decent salary. Building up my retirement was what they were doing, because the last five years' pay, plus your longevity, has more to do with your retirement than anything else. I ended up with a nice retirement out of it.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: I spent thirty-nine years working for the Association altogether. It was a long time.

Back to SAF Presidency

HKS: You were talking about SAF.

WDH: SAF. When I moved to Portland in 1948, of course I joined the Columbia River Section, but I never gave up my membership in the Puget Sound Section, my home section. Only one year the whole time I'd been a member of SAF, I didn't belong to either one or both of those sections out there, and that's the year I was a student at Duke and I was a member of the Appalachian section for one year.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: Because I couldn't afford to belong to two that year. We were poor as church mice as kids who got married and went to school. Anyway, I maintained my interest in the SAF. I served on the editorial board seven years all together from 1947 until 1953. In the meantime they'd changed the title of associate editor in private forestry. I recommended they do away with that. I said, "We ought to make it forest management and engineering or something like that," and that's what they did. So I ended up as the associate editor of forest management and engineering. We had logging engineering covered under that as well as industrial forest management.

In 1957 I was proselytized by Ed Heacox mainly, who had served a couple terms on the Council. He said, "I think you ought to get active in the national society," and he asked me if I would be willing if he circulated a petition nominating me for the Council. They did, and I was elected. Then I served in 1958 and '9, re-elected in '59, served '60 and '61. The boys said we were trying to straighten out some things. What we were trying to do really, the society was completely run by the Forest Service and the professors. We were trying to take it away from them, so the boys talked me into running for a third term which was kind of unprecedented. Most members only ran and served on the Council two terms and that was it. So I ran for a third term and I got elected for 1962- 63.

Then, the boys said, "You ought to run for president now." So they ran me for president against Phil Briegleb and Ernie Allen. Well, Ernie Allen and I were very close friends. I really wanted to see Ernie elected president, although Phil and I were very close

89 personal friends too as we are to this day. I ran third in the field of three. Phil was elected president and Ernie was elected vice-president.

So the boys came after me two years after that and said, "Run again. You've got better name familiarity. You've been a candidate once," and all that sort of thing. "Well," I said, "only on one condition. I don't think a man running for an office in the professional society should campaign. I think his friends ought to do all the campaigning. If you guys will organize the country and go out and get people all over the country, not just our own region, but go to the South and the Lake States and Northeast, and do a job in each major section where you've got somebody that you know that will go out and do it, I'll do it." So they said they'd do it and they did.

The good break I got was that there were the four candidates, these were the days when the man with the highest vote was elected president, the second highest vice-president. That's the way it worked. In that election there was Hagenstein running against three professors: Frank Kaufert from the University of Minnesota, Archie Patterson from the University of Georgia, and Ken Davis from the University of Michigan. Ken was still at Michigan then, and he hadn't moved to Yale yet. The three professors divided the votes up well enough that I got elected. We had the Hare System of proportional representation then.

HKS: Oh, yeah.

WDH: Nobody understood it. The only guy who ever could explain it was Henry Clepper, and when he got through explaining it nobody understood what the hell he'd said. [laughs]

HKS: I know. There was an argument for a long time over the Hare System.

WDH: Oh, it was terrible, terrible. I helped get rid of it. It was on my motion that we publish the results to show people how the god damn thing worked, in the Journal. Meyering was associate secretary. He had been a prof at New York State College of Forestry, and then was hired as associate secretary. We ran him off later when Hardy Glascock was executive vice president. He was a funny kid in a way. Nice fellow, but he didn't do a very good job for us. But he published the article on the Hare System.

I've got to tell you one interesting thing. The first public announcement that I was elected president was made at the Western Forestry and Conservation Association meeting, which was being held in the Bayshore Inn in Vancouver, B.C., that year. When it was announced, why of course, I was asked to stand up and the boys politely applauded, because I knew practically everybody in the room. And the kid from Yale-- who was the dean--Mergen was there, and he came over and said to me, "You know, you only got elected by forty-eight votes." Of course I didn't know. I knew I'd been elected. I didn't have any details. "You only got elected by forty-eight votes," he said. "Well," I said, "wait a minute. Let's figure this out. There were probably about seven thousand ballots cast in our election. You know John Kennedy was elected president of the United States by only about a hundred and ten thousand votes in the popular vote over Nixon, and probably about sixty million people voted. So, I was elected president

90 of SAF with a hell of a lot bigger plurality for Christ's sake than John Kennedy got when he was elected president of the United States." I shouldn't have said a thing like that, but he had made me kind of mad when he said what he did.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: He was kind of nasty really. And I had to give the son of a bitch a medal the next year. He got the Barrington Moore Award. I had to present it to him as president. [both laugh] He's dead now. Did you know Mergen?

HKS: I knew who he was.

WDH: He was a Luxembourger. He was a forest geneticist and a lousy prof from what the Yale students said about him. But he was in the Underground during the war, and I guess he was a hero in that when the Germans invaded Luxembourg.

HKS: Do you want to talk about the transition from Henry Clepper to Hardy Glascock? From out in the field it looked like Henry really wasn't ready to go, but it happened.

WDH: He was sixty-five. He was retirement age. He was ready to retire. He wasn't pushed out. Of course I didn't have anything to do with hiring Hardy. Hardy was hired by Phil Briegleb. Phil was president until the first of January 1966, and Hardy didn't come on the job until the first of March 1966. The first two months I was president, Henry was still in the job. Henry and I were very good friends for many years, although we had our differences. He would get mad as hell at me on occasion, because I'd rip into the profs in our Council meetings about some of the things they were trying to do. We had a terrible problem in the accreditation activity in the society in that with the great proliferation of forestry schools right after World War II when the GI Bill entitled so many young men to go to school and enrollments increased, the schools proliferated. The old-line schools wanted to control accreditation, almost like a union shop, and a result of it there were some terribly hard feelings by some of these fellows in these newer schools who struggled to try to get up to the accreditation standard because they wanted their school to be accredited. They did that for their own careers and for the benefit of their students.

These older men, from these older, well established, the old-line schools, all played puss in the corner with them, just hard to get. We had some terrible arguments in the Council over this, because the committee on accreditation. It wasn't called that, it had some cumbersome name. It was called the CAFE Committee. Committee on Accreditation of Forestry Education or something like that. I've always wanted to change it and just call it the Accreditation Committee, but I don't think we ever made that. I never was one to get tied down to details on things that the profs wanted to do, because they were such piss ants about so many things. I was really rough on them. I was all hooktender, camp foreman, and side rod on them. I'd run right over them like a kid I was going to run off who was a poor choker setter. It wasn't very nice of me sometimes. I was a little bit too Douglas-fir logger for some of these boys that came from the eastern schools. You can't change your own personality, just to accommodate people like that. You've got to be yourself. I was always myself.

91 SAF Finances

HKS: What were the issues in SAF that you faced as president?

WDH: The first one was we were bankrupt.

HKS: That's a pretty big issue.

WDH: We were bankrupt, and I had to go out and sell a dues' raise. Phil had tried to get a dues raise of ten dollars a year the year before, and it required a two thirds vote of the members that voted, under the constitution. You had to amend the constitution to raise the dues. So I convinced the council the next year in '66. I said, "We need to get the money." We were faced with a two hundred thousand dollar deficit budget, and that was going to kill the society if we didn't overcome it. So I convinced them that we ought to do it, but I said, "Not ten dollars. Let's just add five dollars and then cut our expenditures." Just cut our expenditures to what we can handle.

Let's go back a little ways. One of the things that had put us in the unfavorable financial position, it wasn't Phil's fault or his Council's fault, it was something that had been building up over a long period. In 1958 when Charlie Connaughton and I were both freshmen on the Council and we had our first meeting in the old Mills building at Seventeenth and Pennsylvania Avenue where the SAF had their headquarters in those days, just right across the street from the old Army-Navy state building.

HKS: I've been in that building.

WDH: You know the building, of course. It was a musty old room. It was a terrible place, and there was hardly room for us to sit in it. Charlie turned to me and said, "How much do we pay these fellows?" I said, "I don't know." He said, "Don't you think we ought to find out." I said, "Yes, we should." He said, "Have we got a retirement program for them?" I said, "I don't know." He said, "Well, we ought to find that out too." Charlie was a wonderful man in wanting to see to it that people were looked after. He had a natural, inherent feeling. He was a paterfamilias type. He really was. He was a fine man.

So we kicked Henry out of the meeting, and we called Miss Warren in, L. Audrey Warren, who was an old maid who was our business manager and bookkeeper. We sat her at the head of the table where Henry had been sitting and asked her how much Henry got paid. She practically went into orbit. It was none of our god damned business. [both laugh] Charlie got a little bit mad at her. "Why, " he said, "Miss Audrey?" He called her that. She was a southern girl, so she was always called Miss Audrey, you know, not Miss Warren, but Miss Audrey. "Miss Audrey," he said, "we just need to know, because we're thinking that maybe our staff's underpaid and we might want to raise some salaries." [laughs] That brightened her eyes up a little bit. You could see her eyes twinkle behind her glasses, and she said, "Well, Mr. Clepper gets nine thousand dollars a year." In 1958 in Washington, D.C., a man with a couple of college kids getting nine thousand dollars a year! Then we said, "What kind of retirement program?" The retirement program for Mr. Clepper consisted of, he bought a

92 fifty dollar government bond for which he had to pay thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents each month. The society bought one too. Each of them would mature in ten years or whatever at fifty dollars. And the bond he bought and the bond that we bought were put in Society's safety deposit box against the time when he would be sixty-five years of age. Well Christ, that was no retirement program at all. It was awful.

HKS: So he got social security. That was it. Didn't Henry ever campaign for more equitable compensation?

WDH: No. And the reason he didn't have more, the god damned Council had been controlled by the profs for so long. The profs all were busy at home with their own tenure and their own stuff, and they never paid a bit of attention to the employees of the Society. When you went down below Clepper to Miss Warren and the editor of the Journal and all, they were terribly poorly paid, no decent retirement. It was a terrible outfit. One that all of our members should have been ashamed of. Charlie and I, between the two of us, we fixed it up, and we got Clepper raised up to where the time that he retired he was getting almost twice as much as when we started there just in a few years, from 1958 to 1966. It would be eight years time. We got a decent retirement program for him, so that by the time be retired he'd end up with a six or seven hundred dollar a month pension, which in those days, it's a long time ago now, wasn't too bad. Wouldn't be that good now, but it was good then. When we did that of course, when a man worked there for twenty-nine years and you only have six or seven years to build up that retirement for him, you know it costs a lot of money.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: So that's why the Society got in trouble. But the god damned profs, even guys like George Garratt, they never paid attention to things like that. George was president when Charlie and I took this thing on, and we couldn't get George to want to talk about it.

HKS: Were there issues? Was an issue? Was SAF taking positions on issues?

WDH: With the wilderness issue we had a big debate in the annual meeting of the Society in 1958. I was chairman of the session, as a matter of fact, conducted it on wilderness at the meeting which was held in Salt Lake City. And we discussed it several times after that. Another issue before the Society during the period when I was president was the great interest in licensing in a lot of states.

HKS: I remember that.

WDH: We had some discussion on that. But wilderness, we were kind of over that one really. By the time I was president, the Wilderness Act had been passed, so that was put aside. The clearcutting thing didn't really erupt really until the early '70s, after I was president. But the Society did get into it and took some positions on it. The other thing in the Society was that they wanted to move their headquarters, and they finally did, but that was after my time. I mean we had moved the headquarters out of the Mills building

93 when I was on the Council over to a building on, almost across the street from the old Statler Hotel at Sixteenth and K Streets. We had a rented building across the street, about a three or four story building. We had a couple of floors over there.

HKS: You must have known Tom Gill.

WDH: Oh, sure, knew him very well. One of the things also, when I was president, we'd had a Committee on World Forestry, I guess it was called. Gill was active in that and a Duke University graduate, Les Harper, was in it. Bob Winters, who was a Forest Service guy who had spent some time abroad, and a New York State College of Forestry prof by the name of Larson. These guys had been trying to get the Society into all kinds of stuff like that. They wanted to go to the National Science Foundation and get grants, and then this committee would recommend people that go to foreign meetings like the IUFRO meetings. It was the profs trying to get European trips for Christ's sake, at somebody else's expense. So we got a grant after Hardy had come aboard, the first of March 1966, but instead of us having our committee make the decision who's going to get the grants, we left it up to the National Science Foundation. We thought that they ought to be the ones to make the grants. If there was a guy that really had a legitimate reason to go to a foreign meeting of some kind that they would grant him the money to go and that sort of thing. We didn't have a lot of money. I think it was ten thousand dollars or something like that, but back then a guy could get a grant of eight hundred or thousand bucks he could go off to something and do pretty well.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: But because of the antipathy of what we were doing there, this committee got obstreperous, so I did away with the whole committee. I appointed all new committees. There wasn't a committee in the society that was the same after I became president. I went through and cleaned house. I put a bunch of younger men in there. I stirred everything around. Instead of the old guys who'd been running all these things for years, we just cleaned the whole works out. You know, of course, that Hardy worked for me for seven or eight years before that.

HKS: He came out of the association, didn't he?

WDH: He was the district forester for IFA at Eugene. I hired him in November of 1951, and he worked for me until March of 1958. He was our district forester. So he and I were very closely associated for a long time, although I had nothing to do with hiring him as the executive for SAF except I proselyted him to apply for it, because I thought he'd be a good man for it. Phil and his Council hired him before I was there.

We were in such a mess financially that I traveled a hundred thousand miles that first year as president for SAF to sell the dues raise. I went to all kinds of section meetings, and was the banquet speaker and that sort of thing, because two thirds of the members had to vote for it. And if I hadn't gone to campaign for that, it probably wouldn't have passed.

HKS: IFA was paying this travel?

94

WDH: No. When I became president of SAF, I made SAF be self-sustaining. No more of this business of electing guys to Council because their employer would pay their way. All SAF expenses including council members going to the council meetings, SAF paid it. I established that as a policy. In other words, we shouldn't be a bunch of panhandlers from the Forest Service or universities or Weyerhaeuser. We ought to pay our own way. If we're going to be a professional society, let's act like professionals. That means pay our own way. And they do that to this day.

Anyway I sold the dues raise, but we still had some things to do. We had a whole bunch of staff guys. We had Young Rainer who was the business manager. We had Meyering who was the associate executive secretary. We had Art Meyer, the editor of the Journal. When Hardy got there and saw what was going on, he said, "We've got to clean house. We've got to get rid of all these guys." We fired them all. It was a miserable thing. I had the dirty job of telling every one of them that they were through.

HKS: Meyer was an alcoholic, right? I heard that.

WDH: I didn't know that, but I think he may have been.

HKS: Hardy told me once that people came to work at eight, nine, ten o'clock. Everyone set their own schedule.

WDH: Oh, there was no schedule. I mean it was run like an old southern farm home.

HKS: But that was Henry's management style.

WDH: Oh, sure. Henry was a very nice man, and he was a high grade professional really. But he had an obstinate streak in him, and he couldn't take suggestions from anybody--including his wife. I knew his wife very well. He used to have me to their home for dinner. They lived in Virginia, and I used to go there for years. She was a very nice girl. She and I used to talk, and she used to bitch to me about Henry. I'd laugh and say, "All husbands and wives have their differences, what the hell." But Henry was always very nice to me, although we argued. We had some knock down drag out arguments about things that didn't really amount to a damn. I always supported him, because he used to be run down at section meetings I went to, when I was president. A lot of guys would criticize him, so I'd take them on and say, "Well, let me tell you something. In the first place we never paid him very well. We never had a decent retirement program for him. We didn't give him the kind of support that a professional society should give to their executive."

On the other hand, he never let us down. He worked his can off for the profession. He worked hard. Sure, you didn't like the Journal. You didn't think it was doing well and all that sort of thing. You thought he was kind of stuff-shirted and all of that." His worse god damned thing was that at annual meetings--people used to bitch about it--he always arranged for free entertainment. At Colorado Springs in 1954, we had the Piegan Indian dancers, and they bored the audience to death at the banquet. In Boston in 1948, we had a bunch of women that were bell ringers that got up there in calico dresses and rang

95 bells. [both laugh] Well, we did away with that. Now, they've done away with the banquet. He always wanted the people to come to the banquet, he wanted the people at the head table to come there with tuxedos. Well, hell, the average guy who wasn't a college professor in our profession didn't own a tuxedo.

HKS: That's right.

WDH: I finally got one because I had to go to some formal thing for the governor of Washington once, you had to do it. A governor's conference or something. And I couldn't even button the shirt. I had to have help to do it. [laughs] Henry was a fine gentleman. He was academic. He was very academic.

Wild Acres Controversy

HKS: You knew Hardy from a variety of ways. Were you surprised at the Wild Acres controversy in the '70s, or the lawsuit?

WDH: I don't know what happened there really. I got the story from Hardy. And I heard from others on it. I heard from Barber. I heard from Borden. I heard from Orell. And it got to be such an involved thing, before it came to a head, that's when Borden was president, I wrote a letter, a one page letter, which I asked to be published in the Journal. I got all the living former presidents to join with me on it, which included Swede Nelson, Paul Dunn, Charlie Connaughton, and Phil Briegleb. We were the signers of the letter. I wrote the letter and I sent it to them and they all concurred, and we sent it and asked it to be published. We made the pitch in that letter that this was hurting the Society, this controversy, and it needed to be settled amicably and soon. We asked that the letter be published, but Borden wouldn't publish the letter. There got to be a strong personality difference between Hardy and the people on the other side including Borden. Borden and Hardy at one time had been very close friends. Borden always attended the Western Forestry meetings when Hardy worked there. Borden and I were good friends at one time too. I don't feel friendly to him much anymore, because I thought he should have published that letter, but to hell with it. You know, it's over and past now, so I don't hold grudges or anything. I'm too old. I'm too forgiving of people, because I know when people get their feet planted they're hard to move, and he was that way on that subject.

I don't know what really happened there, but whoever was president of the Society before when the thing got started--I think it was Bernie Orell. Bernie was ill at the time and Bernie was never an active president of the Society. Bernie was too busy with his Weyerhaeuser job. He liked the honor of being president, but he didn't like the work with it. So as a result, this thing got into a controversy that was so complex that nobody really understood it. It hurt the Society. I thought maybe the Society bit off a little bit too much when they went on to get involved in a thing like that, but I don't know, because I wasn't that close to it then.

HKS: Sure.

96 WDH: I don't really have a strong opinion on that. Hardy and I are still good friends except I don't see him anymore. He lives in Corvallis, and I invite him continually to stop in and have lunch with me and come to my office in Portland, but I never hear from him except a Christmas card now; that's all I get.

He panhandled me to give money to the Natural Resources Foundation, and I didn't feel I wanted to contribute to it. I have got other things I wanted to contribute to. I give money as memorials for example to colleagues in our Society to the Foresters Fund. I've done that for years, as memorials to foresters that I knew and liked and respected and held in high esteem professionally. I want to continue to do that, but I don't want to give money to a Natural Resources Council thing when I don't understand what the hell they're really up to.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: I'm not that interested in it. I've got other things I'm more interested in. So I turned him down on that. Well, Hardy himself gave a very large amount to that damn thing, and he was the public member on their board.

Hardy's parents owned a very valuable timber property which he located and bought for them when he was a student, when he was taking the naval V-12 program during the war. Before he was commissioned in the Navy from Oregon State, he used to spend weekends on the bus going from Corvallis over into Lincoln County over in the Coast Range. He bought this big combination timber and sheep ranch over there for his dad. His father was a professor of geology at a school that's located at Riverside, California. What's the name of it? University of Redlands or something like that?

HKS: Something like that.

WDH: Hardy's grandfather was a very successful and probably wealthy wholesale groceryman in Muncie, Indiana. Hardy never talked to me very much about his grandparents, but I've met his parents. His parents both lived on this tree farm. They're both deceased now. Hardy and his brother, John, and a sister, who lives in Indiana I think, inherited this property, and Hardy has a son who lives on it and manages it. It was a beautiful stand. There was the 1854 fire, so it's a hundred and forty year old timber now. Lincoln County's a good site county. The hundred and forty year stand probably has two hundred thousand feet to the acre.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: They've been logging it in the last, well since Hardy went back to Oregon, they've been logging it right along. I don't know how much timber they've got, but it's a good sized property. It's about twelve to fifteen hundred acres all together.

He was born in 1922. That makes him, he's seventy years old this year. He's really a very able guy. He was a fine forester, energetic, very articulate. He's a good writer, a good speaker. And he's honest. That's the thing that hurt me about all the implications of this difficulty up there at Wild Acres. The implication from a lot of the people was that

97 somehow he was dishonest, and I just can't believe that. I just think the whole thing is a terrible misunderstanding that is so complex that the average one of us will never really understand it. They used to discuss it at the annual meetings, and god, it got to be kind of a cause c‚lŠbre for everybody who was president to get up there and kind of either take on Hardy or apologize for the Society or some damn thing.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: It was embarrassing really.

HKS: And expensive.

WDH: Oh, it cost us a fortune, because they had all kinds of legal services. They don't come cheap anymore. Never did I guess.

HKS: I'm sure that SAF will come up at times when we go through the rest of the interview.

Madrid Forestry Congress

WDH: Well, it was a great experience for me. It gave me the chance to travel widely and visit with all kinds of fine people all over the country. I had a couple of bad experiences with it, one of which Ed Heacox never forgave the Forest Service for. When the was held in Madrid, Spain in 1966, I had been president for six months. It was held in June of 1966. I had been president since the first of January. Neither Ken Davis, the vice-president of the Society, and myself were appointed members of the official United States delegation. It was very embarrassing when we met the delegations of other countries at the meeting, asking us if we were coming to the official affairs where the delegation was going. Of course, Ken and I couldn't go because we weren't members of the delegation. Ed Heacox took on Ed Cliff, who was chief of the Forest Service at the time, and of course the Forest Service ran the thing. The State Department gives the people clearance to go to meetings like that, but the Forest Service would handle it with the State Department. Ed Heacox wrote a hot letter asking why the president and vice-president of the Society weren't among the official delegation. Ed Cliff said that they couldn't get security clearance for us in time. Well, Jesus, for a man who served his country for Christ's sake in World War II overseas, if they couldn't get security for him, who the hell could they get?

Davis wasn't in the service, but, you know, he was a man of integrity and a man of some note in our profession. He wouldn't have had any trouble getting a security clearance. They just weren't appointing us, that's all. It was a little bit personal, Ed thought, that they were getting at me for taking them on in the regulation issue. That's what he thought it was. [laughs] Way back. But if it was, it was pretty petty.

But let me to tell you the highlight of it anyway. I never told this in public before, and you may not want to include it in this, but it will entertain you. I speak Spanish. I worked in Costa Rica for six months and had three hundred and fifty men who worked

98 for me that didn't speak English, and under those circumstances you learn it very quickly. I'm illiterate. I don't know the grammar very well, but I have one hell of a lot of words. Lots of nouns and adjectives and enough verbs to make action. I have a quick ear for languages and I think fast, so I speak it and hear it rapidly like the Spanish people do.

So I got up in the meeting, even though I wasn't an official delegate, and made some remark in Spanish, commenting on one of the papers with these two thousand people from ninety countries in the audience. The minister of agriculture and forestry of Spain heard this and came over afterwards, because I had commented that I had taken a trip for three days and had visited some of the reforestation of which Spain was doing a hell of a job. I was very much impressed with it, and I told them so, what I'd seen. We'd gone into the south end of the Pyrenees and saw these tremendous plantations from the creek clear to the mountain tops, where they had carried the soil up in baskets on men's backs. The Moors brought the goats and forests in Spain were destroyed over a thousand years ago. It was of land that had once been forested but not for ten centuries, and they really worked hard to do it. After they'd put the soil in these holes up there they'd prepare, they'd water these trees for a couple of years by hand to get them started. Whole mountain sides. Beautiful. Beautiful. Pine mostly, some of it Monterey pine.

But this fellow says, "It would be a great thing if you could accompany me and I could get an audience with Francisco Franco, and you tell him what you told this group today." He said, "Would you like to do that?" I said, "Well, of course. Of course I'd like to meet him."

They sent a car and driver to pick me up at my hotel in two days. We had a motorcycle escort of men with coal scuttle helmets on. [both laugh] Took us to the presidential palace and went right in to see the generalissimo. The minister met me there. We went in, and we had a fifteen minute audience where we spoke Spanish to one another and I told them what a great job they'd done and all that. He was very pleased, because what I hadn't known until then, it was his idea that they do this. He was the stem winder. Francisco Franco was the stem winder to afforest the lands that the Moorish goats had ruined. Today, the forecast in Spain is that within twenty-five years the country is going to be self-sufficient in wood. When I was there, I went up to visit San Sebastian and there was a pulpmill up there, and the pulpwood that they were getting was being unloaded. It was scotch pine pulpwood being unloaded off a Swedish ship. It had come from Sweden.

HKS: Right.

WDH: It had come down there to run through the pulpmill. And in twenty-five years that country is going to be self-sufficient in wood, which after it's been a wood importer for-.

HKS: A long time.

WDH: Well, ever since the Inquisition, maybe.

99

HKS: Sure.

WDH: That was the highlight of my experience. So even though I wasn't a member of the official delegation, I was the only American that went there and ever met the generalissimo I guess, in so far as I know. [chuckles] That was one of the highlights of my misspent life.

HKS: What a capital investment the nation made. I mean, economists might challenge that...

WDH: Part of it was make-work too, but it's kind of like shelterbelt and things like that. The results are going to be good for the country. When we were there in the mid-'60s, they were planting four hundred and fifty thousand hectares a year. That's what they were doing then. And that's a lot.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: That's a lot in a country that is as relatively small as it is compared to ours. I've been to Spain three times, and I'm very much impressed with the country and the people. Reading all the history about it you don't think too much of it. The Inquisition. Those of us who were born and raised Protestants in the tradition of Luther and all that were kind of brought up to believe that the Inquisition guys were kind of all bad guys-- and they were. But, boy, those people have really done something with that country now, and one thing that I found out about those people, they're the most honest people you ever saw. If you make a mistake when you're handling foreign money and all that, they'd always, "Oh no, no." They'd straighten it out for you. Tremendous.

Phil Briegleb's wife Ione and my wife Ruth (this is my first wife who's deceased) went to Segovia one day while we were there. Phil and I were attending the meetings. They rented a car and went to Segovia to visit the castles and whatever they do at Segovia. They had a flat tire in this rented car. A Spanish couple in a Volkswagen stopped, a young man and an older man. The older man immediately showed them out of his wallet a symbol for an automobile touring club which is dedicated to helping people in distress. These men changed the tire for the girls. My wife spoke a little Spanish, not as well as I, because when we lived in Costa Rica, she lived in town, I was in the logging camp, so it wasn't the same. But she learned enough of it that she could converse fairly well. They were very much impressed with the kindness of these people, the way they helped them out there. These girls would have been afoot out there, miles from anywhere in this little rented car. My wife and I later in a rented car had the same problem. Right in the middle of the town of Burgos at rush hour, the car stopped. There was a policeman there directing the traffic and he had his white glove. He came down and came over and "Que pasa? What's happening?" I said, "Es falta." He said, "What kind of a car?" I said, "It's a..." What the hell was it? Not a Fiat. The Spanish Fiat has got a different name. Whatever it was in Spanish. A fifteen hundred. A mil quinientos. "Oh," he says, "es el dynamo o bateria, uno o otra." [laughs] I said, "Where can I take it?" and he pointed and told me. Well, I saw the sign that said garage. Well, in Spain a garage isn't where you get a car fixed; it's where you park them. [both laugh] So I

100 pushed the car off the road, and I went there. The fellow said, "I'll fix it." He went to telephone and he called up, and a little fellow came in a little car and he says, "Mil quinientos, es la bateria o el dynamo, uno o otra, one or the other." What had happened was the generator--dynamo they call generator, dynamo--the generator belt was not generating, because there was too much slack, so he put a bar in there [laughs loudly], pulled that sheave (pulley) back to where the belt was tight, and then he towed us to his place where they charged the battery. I asked him how much it was, and it was about five hundred pesetas, so I gave him seven hundred. I was going to give him two hundred more for a tip for being so kind to us. He wouldn't take it. He said, "No, no. No servicio, no service. No propina, no tip." I was very much impressed with the Spanish people.

HKS: I can see that.

WDH: But their reforestation impressed me very markedly.

National Timber Supply Act

HKS: Let's turn to the National Timber Supply Act even though it was never adopted into law. It should be called National Timber Supply Bill, I guess. You must have been involved in that.

WDH: Yes. I was a witness before the House Committee on Agriculture, the subcommittee on forests. A congressman from South Carolina was the chairman, John McMillan, at the time. I remember it very distinctly, because I had been in Washington, D.C., when my wife was there for something else. We decided to take a week off, and we rented a car and we went out to the Outer Banks in North Carolina where neither of us had ever been before. We spent a night at Nag's Head, and went all the way down to Ocracoke, took the ferry across and went to the Roanoke thing and finally went back up to Washington through Williamsburg and did a lot of things we had never done before.

But when we were at Nag's Head, I got a call from Ralph Hodges. He said, "They've scheduled a hearing. You've got to get up here. You're going to be one of the witnesses." So I had about two hours before the hearing to prepare my testimony [laughs], before the hearing. Congressman McMillan, whom I knew, and the girl who was the clerk of the committee, Christine Gallagher. She was a big girl. She weighed about two hundred and seventy-five, eighty pounds. She was a professional staffer. McMillan said, "We really appreciate your taking off from your vacation to come up here and help us on this historical legislation." That's what he called it, historical legislation. "Well," I said, "I'm glad to be of help, Mr. Chairman. What do you want to know?" He said, "Give us your testimony in your own way." So I did.

Right away, when that bill was introduced, the anti-forestry forces in the country really ganged up on it, and they prevented anything from happening with it. The Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, the Trustees for Conservation, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, all those groups said, "This isn't for us." All we were trying to do was to pass policy legislation which would set the stage for the national forests to play the

101 part their founding fathers envisioned for them. You know, the time had come for them to get ready to go, but it didn't happen. Too bad, because it probably would have been a good thing for the country. Now we may be over the hump on it. Maybe something like that will never happen now.

That leads me to one thing that perhaps we ought to say. One of the big arguments against the Wilderness Bill at the outset of it was that we're beginning to fragment the National Forest System by setting aside a significant portion of it for one special use. That lead me to think that if that continued that the bad part about it would be that we'd continue to do that for other special uses, so that one day we'd have to go to the Congress and say, "We're going to have to fragment those lands which obviously should be used for practicing forestry as a timber production area, and have a timber production system as well as a wilderness system." But I don't know whether that's possible for it to ever happen now.

HKS: Your cousin Perry pointed out to me last year something that's very obvious once you think about it. In 1960 Congress passed the Multiple Use Act, and since then they've been passing special single-use legislation.

WDH: That's right. More fragmentation.

HKS: More fragmentation. And the special purpose legislation gets through so much easier than any general legislation.

WDH: Yes it does. It's probably easier to articulate things that are popular than those that are unpopular. Unfortunately in talking about timber production you're talking about the cutting of trees. While the forest industry has great social acceptance from the standpoint that the consumer loves our products which we produce for housing, for packaging, for communication, for convenience; and they love the idea that we reproduce those forests by reforestation; they respond very generously to the plea for keeping each state green through the forest fire prevention program; they don't like the idea of stumps/clearcuts and what not, and that's awfully easy to merchandise against forestry by taking horror pictures of that sort of thing. The dishonesty of the anti- forestry forces is apparent to me in that all that they decry, all the bad visuals that come from the harvesting of timber, they never show the reforestation, they never show the consumers' use of the products that came out of it.

One of the strong points that I make continuously in public appearances, as I did recently in a letter to the Oregonian which they published and I was surprised they did, because I accused them of vying with the Washington Post for being one of the most anti-forestry dailies in the United States. I said, "Those old growth trees that everybody is crying about are standing yet throughout the country which made us, in this century, the best housed country in the world and a quarter of those houses came out of the original forests of Oregon and Washington. They're standing yet." And I said, "It's the same thing as Colonel Greeley pointed out in his book, that people decried the passing of the virgin Lake States pineries, but he said that the Lake States pineries are standing yet in the homes and the barns in the Midwest that made us the best fed people on Earth. The homes that were built for the people and the barns were built for the animals

102 that made us the best-fed people on Earth. And it's true. Beyond that, we're replacing those forests with new forests because of the job we've done in protection first and reforestation second." But it falls on deaf ears. The Oregonian will print a letter on it, but they won't write an editorial about it or they won't have a feature story about it.

HKS: Why is that do you think?

WDH: You've got a newspaper that's owned by the Newhouse family all of whom live in New Jersey and New York, who've taken over magazines like Vanity Fair that used to be a fashionable ladies magazine and now it's filled with pornography every month. You know, if you want to read four-letter words or the participles or the gerundives that come from them, you turn the page of Vanity Fair and in a feature article about some prominent person and you'll find them, because they're there.

HKS: But the circulation depends...

WDH: They don't care. They don't care.

HKS: In order to get advertising, you have to have circulation.

WDH: Sure.

HKS: And that suggests that the average person in western Oregon is, if not environmental, certainly not fully compatible with the forest products industry. But do you think the average person on the street is that way? Is this what it means?

WDH: No, I don't think the average person is that way if you are able to really get an accurate poll of them. The average person that lives in an area like that, if they are caring at all, knows that everyplace they go that there are active forestry operations both in the harvesting of timber and the growing of trees and the protection against fire that is very important to their future. They all understand it. You know, 40 percent of the economy of Oregon depends on forestry. Forty percent of it. Four out of every ten persons depends on it.

HKS: The Newhouses are selling these newspapers that have a point of view, why...?

WDH: I don't know.

HKS: You don't have insight into that.

WDH: No, I don't really. The editorial staff, the editor of the newspaper is a very fine colored gentleman by the name of Bill Hilliard. But most of his city editors and reporters and editorial people with the exception of one or two are Ivy League school kids. They think that the tenor of the country is that the environmental game is the game to play, and they're pandering to it in their news stories. Their news stories aren't news stories anymore. They don't report what occurs. Just to give you one illustration, when I testified before the God Squad, you had to go and sign up to appear. I wasn't representing anybody, just myself. I don't have any clients right now. Since I was

103 incapacitated there for a while, I haven't done any work for two years. I haven't taken in a dime. The total income of my company last year was forty-nine dollars. I paid more than that out in business license, corporation tax, corporation permit and that sort of stuff, I paid out more than that. I do my own income tax. That's easy to do, of course, when you don't have any income. [both laugh] It doesn't take much time to do it.

The first day none of the principals were there. The secretary of the interior wasn't there. The secretary of the army wasn't there. They all had surrogates for them. The secretary of the army appointed somebody to represent him, secretary of the interior, and so on. The governor of Oregon had a guy who's the head of the TRI-MET now which is the local, public transportation system and he used to be chairman of the State Board of Forestry. Of course they were all there, the loggers were all there to testify with their yellow ribbons. The environmental crew were all there. Everybody got up and made terrible speeches, and then after about two or three hours, they had to start limiting the people. They'd give them two minutes or something like that to turn in your testimony, make an oral statement. So I didn't get called the first day, because I was about a hundred and fifteenth on the list.

So I went the next morning. Well Christ, there was nobody there by that time. The television had all disappeared. And I was sitting down there in this big auditorium in the Bonneville Power Administration. There's a big auditorium there that holds about seven or eight hundred people, and there were probably about sixteen or seventeen people in the audience plus the God Squad sitting up on the platform and a stenotypist up there taking the minutes and all that. I don't think there was any television left there. I think they were all gone the day before. So I was sitting down there, and a girl came up and said, "I'm from the Oregonian. May I have a copy of your paper?" Well, I never met her before, but I recognized her. Her name is Kathy Durbin, and she writes crappy stuff about our industry and about our profession. It's very biased. I mean, she's not very honest. So I said, "Yes, I have a copy of it, but, Miss Durbin-." She said, "Mrs." I said, "I'm sorry. I didn't know you were married. You can have a copy of it, but only on one condition. If you use anything out of it, I want to be quoted exactly as I have said it. I don't want you to interpret it or misinterpret it. Because I've read some of the stuff you write and it isn't too strict in accordance with what it ought to be." She snatched this paper out of my hands, never said "thank you," and went up the aisle.

Then she used some innocuous thing in it that didn't say a god damned thing, and put it in the paper, because she was looking for a story. I had said in this that the trees were standing yet and the houses and all that for making a headline. I had the thing that would make a headline. You know I'm a headline maker. I've made all kinds of them in my life. I know how to do it. I said that the United States government is guilty of perpetrating a fraud upon the people of the Northwest. There's a hundred thousand families whose homes, jobs, schools, and communities are at jeopardy because of this business of the interpretation of the Endangered Species Act that pays more attention to the furry and feathered folk of the forest than it does to the people who live in town. There was a headline there. Any newspaperman worthy of salt would get that. I used to make them by saying that it makes every cash register in Oregon ring. They'd print it that way. Well, she didn't use anything like that. She used only innocuous stuff.

104 Now, they'll print letters. My average number of letters to the Oregonian now is about one every twelve business days, and they print about one out of five of them. They won't print you too often. They say, "Well, the god damn guy's a crank." I write pithy, publishable letters. And the one I wrote accusing them of vying with the Washington Post, becoming one of the most anti-forestry dailies in America, I didn't think they'd publish. They published it on Saturday, when they've got two full pages of this, on the editorial page, opposing pages. They print maybe fourteen, fifteen, twenty letters on a Saturday, and mine was number one on the first page. They put it right up there at the top. I got twenty-five phone calls in two day about it. But all of them from people who agree with me. One of them was a son of a man that I knew who had just died, a fellow by the name of Howard Millan. You probably knew him. He worked for Weyerhaeuser and went to the University of Washington. He was the only graduate of our college in the class of 1944, everybody was gone in the war.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: This kid had a punctured eardrum or something and couldn't pass the physical, so he wasn't in the service and he was graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in forest management in 1944. He and his wife were driving to Los Angeles or Pasadena to go to the Rose Bowl game, because the Huskies were playing there. He died down there of a heart attack. A nice young man. It was his son who called me up, and he said, "My father was a forester. He would certainly agree with the things you said in your letter." I said, "What was your father's name?" He said, "Howard Millan." I said, "I knew your father for fifty years. Of course he'd have agreed, he was a fine man." [chuckles]

HKS: Maybe it's too simple, but urbanized people-. And Oregon is an urbanized state probably.

WDH: It is now.

HKS: Urbanized people have lost their sense of roots to where resources come from.

WDH: Sure.

HKS: Therefore a newspaper can deal with rural issues, and it doesn't bother the urban people. Is that it?

WDH: Not a bit. You're right. I once made a considerable study of that for my own purposes. I said it in a couple of sentences in a paper that I gave in San Francisco once before the California State Chamber of Commerce, that we've got what I call an "urban psychosis" which is that the kids of the growing-up generation believe that food comes from the Safeway store, gasoline from the service station, water from the tap in the kitchen, and lumber from the lumber yard. They don't associate any of these things with fields or forests or mines or wells. And they don't. Even though their whole life depends upon the products that come from those sources.

HKS: Sure.

105

WDH: I wrote a similar letter to Forbes magazine last year, and they published it, in which they had interviewed this Australian newspaperman, Murdock. He was saying that we didn't need to use natural resources anymore to have an economy, because the exchange of information would be the basis of our economy. So my response to it was that I always thought that Murdock was pretty hep until I read this statement, and I'd just like to say that when we are all busy with our personal computers that we won't have anything meaningful to compute unless we've got some reference to products that come from the field, the mine, the forest, the well, and the air. And they published it. But journalism schools could use a hell of an infusion of common sense. That's the trouble today, Pete. We don't have a school system anywhere in the United States that gives a three hour course in common sense. It has disappeared. We used to have it, and we didn't have a formal course in it, but we had it anyway.

Wild and Scenic Rivers

HKS: Wild and scenic rivers in Oregon. What's your assessment of that and the legislation and the debates?

WDH: Oh, it's part of the same old stuff. If you can't get them one way, you get them another. The legislation several years ago was going to create a whole bunch of new rivers--national legislation. One of the rivers was the Alsea. The Alsea is a world class steelhead stream. Steelhead fisherman come from all over the world to fish it. There's a few companies that own a little land along it. The lower end of it is awful heavy to either national forest or BLM lands. A lot of the riparian lands are in federal ownership. Of course the government doesn't care whether it's put into one thing or another. They don't give a damn about whether they practice forestry or not anymore. But these companies that were the owners in there, there were companies like the Holl-Oakes Lumber Company. Its mill is at Bellfountain, Oregon. It's the only steam mill left in the state by the way. It cuts timbers up to eighty-five feet long.

HKS: Wow. Steam mill. Hard to imagine where they get their spare parts.

WDH: Oh, he gets them. Willamette Industries is another one of the owners there. The Starker family, Starker Forests, they own a chunk in there. I was hired by these people in a professional way to go and look the north fork of the Alsea River over to see whether it was suitable for a scenic river. The big proponents of it were the kayakers. This river geologically has canyons that go down like this [motions] with boulders that fall off these hills in there, and you'd have to portage the kayaks around up over a four hundred foot bluff to get down to where there's enough water in the summertime to continue to go downstream in it. A lot of the land along the side of those canyons, even though it's timber, is never going to be harvested because it's impossible to get it economically. They're going to leave it. They're going to log to the edges of it, and what's on these steep slopes they're going to leave.

Under state law they've got to leave a riparian zone anyway. They've got to leave timber uncut to fifty feet on either side in Oregon right now for a secondary stream. And I

106 guess more than fifty feet on a bigger stream. The companies are doing a pretty good job of complying with that law. Because a lot of that stuff right along the stream is hardwood. If it's alder, why they're not going to fuss with it much because alder is valuable and all that, but they're going to leave a lot of it. The only thing wrong with leaving riparian strips is that in our region, they're apt to blow over. And they do, so you've got to go back and salvage log them right away. It's a good idea in theory, but it isn't always very practical. But I think that Hatfield was for scenic rivers the legislation. I guess he was one of the introducers of it. It was an Oregon Scenic Rivers bill.

Of course you've got a bunch of environmental groups doing their part to promote it. There's an Oregon Rivers Council. The environmental groups have been very clever in the last twenty-five years in organizing all kinds of additional groups with different names. Then they use them for publicity. They'll hire some person part-time to put out press releases and all that. They get in the papers a lot. They know how to do it, and they know how to hit television.

Hatfield introduced this thing, and the people in the Alsea were mad, so somebody got the idea--and it was the wife of a retired professor at Oregon State who is a farmer now down in the Alsea--to put up a bunch of Burma Shave type signs along the highway from Waldport clear up to the confluence of the north and south forks of this river. It's about twenty-five, twenty-six miles. I drove the road one day just for the purpose of seeing these signs. You couldn't drive slowly enough with people crowding. It's just a two-lane road. It's a state highway. So you had to keep driving. But my wife was with me and she was trying to get the sense of these things down.

I ran into Hatfield accidentally at a restaurant one day in Portland. He was home for the weekend or something from Congress. I didn't tell him that I worked for these people down there, because I just wrote a report for them and I went and talked to the director of the Bureau of Land Management, the state director for them. I took the representatives of these companies up there to talk to BLM about it. I asked Hatfield, "Have you been down and seen the road signs, the Burma Shave signs, about the Alsea River?" "No," he said. I said, "Well, you better go down there yourself or send one of your colleagues down there." I saw him a while later. He said, "I sent my local man in Portland down to look at it." He said, "You know, I've withdrawn my support from the legislation." [laughs] They were giving him unshirted hell, and of course he was up for re-election in 1990. This was all just before that in the same area in the Spring, and in the fall of course he was up. He had a contest for the first time in his life. He got the poorest vote he ever got. He never lost an election, but he's all through now. He'll never get re-elected again. Too bad, because he's been a clean guy all the time. The scenic rivers idea is just another bow in their quiver to stop all activity on the land that they are antipathetic toward.

HKS: With some rivers you wouldn't have much impact commercially.

WDH: No, that's right. We've got a lot of those already set aside. Skagit River in Washington is one that is set aside. Would have put our log dump out of business when I was running camp in 1939. [chuckles]

107 The Forest Service and Research

HKS: Would you like to make a general observation about the '60s? We went from Eisenhower, to Kennedy, to Johnson, to Nixon. There's an ideological shift there at least in terms of campaign promises. Does it matter who's president when you're out on the land trying to earn a living?

WDH: I don't think so. The presidents' political pronouncements are all prepared for them by somebody else. Poor guy. He's just whipped to death by everybody that's around him. The bureaucrats are going to set the policy of what happens on the land. Congress isn't even going to do it. The Congress is the board of directors of the federal lands, but the Congress has abrogated its authority there by the authorities that they have given to the executive. The executive isn't the president. The executive is the civil servants in the bureaucracy. If they want to do it, to be progressive and practice the kind of forestry they know how to do--and good lord knows we've spent a lot of money to learn how to do it. How much has been appropriated for the forest experiment stations since the McNary-Sweeney Act? A billion dollars? Maybe twice that. I don't know. It's a lot of money.

HKS: It's a hundred and forty million a year for research now.

WDH: It's a lot. Sure, it's quite a significant appropriation even in a country with a deficit as much as ours. We know what species have to be clearcut to reproduce them. We know the ones that are shade tolerant. We've studied that long ago. We knew that when I was a student in forestry school more than a half century ago. The text books that we used then are just as valid now about the basic considerations as they were then. But in those days there wasn't any political consideration, and now everything is politically considered. If we do this are we going to get this kind of a reaction or are we going to get that kind of a reaction? Somehow we've lost interest in wanting to do the kind of a job that he founding fathers of the national forests, for example, envisioned.

Two years ago I was awarded the William B. Greeley Forestry Award by the American Forestry Association, and I don't know why or how. They never even told me why I got it. I guess probably because I was a loud talker and was associated with Colonel Greeley. But I made a few remarks at the affair where I was presented with it. Chief of the Forest Service, Robertson, was sitting there. Because the award was named after Colonel Greeley, I thought it appropriate to make a few remarks about the Colonel, about my association with him. I entertained them a little bit with a couple of his stories that he liked to tell that were interesting, and then I told them one of my own experiences with him. Some time right after the war, probably in the spring of 1946, he and I were driving from Seattle. He and I shared an office in Seattle until he died, as long as I was still in Seattle which would be 1946 and '7. In '48 I went to Portland, and then of course I wasn't there with him then. But he still had the office. As long as we had an office in Seattle until he died, why, we provided an office for him up there and stenographic service and all. We were going down to Nisqually to visit our nursery.

As we were passing Fort Lewis on highway 99 before it was called I-5, the Colonel put his hand on my knee. I was driving. He said, "Bill, I envy you." I said, "Why's that,

108 Colonel?" He said, "Well, I'm not going to live to see it, but you are. You are going to be really surprised, because you'll see the national forests practicing the kind of forestry that the founding fathers envisioned they would when the day came when it was necessary." He said, "I had a little hand in getting some of it started. I'd like to be around to see it, but I don't think I will." So I told them that story there, and then I turned and looked at Robertson and I said, "Dale, if the Colonel were alive today, he would be very disappointed in the kind of forestry that you people are practicing in the national forests today, because you are not doing any where near as good a job as you know how to do, as the country needs you to do. That wouldn't only be the Colonel's sentiment. That's mine too." Well, I made him a little bit mad. I was nice about it. I wasn't nasty about it, but I was pretty straightforward, pretty blunt.

That night they had this big banquet up at the Statler Hotel at Sixteenth and K, and he and his wife came in and I said, "Good evening, Dale," and he walked right by me. He was still hurting from what I'd said that day at noon. But the interesting thing to me was that there were three or four old-time Forest Service guys in the audience including one former chief, and everyone of them that came up and talked to me afterwards said, "We're disappointed like the Colonel would've been too." That's the feeling of the older men that were around a long time and knew that when the day came, when the country needed it, they were going to be ready to perform. They don't see it happening now. It's a great disappointment to them, personally and professionally.

Forestry Schools

WDH: I knew that I had to retire on April 1, 1980, and while my wife was in her last few weeks of life, I began to talk to a number of companies. Not the major companies, I talked to the medium-sized companies, companies that were generally owned by a family instead of public stock held corporations. I didn't talk to Weyerhaeuser. I talked to companies like Simpson, Medford Corporation, Giostina Brothers, Davidson Industries, saying that what I wanted to do when I retired. I wanted to make a little brochure that would set forth my credentials and offer to go to the forestry schools of the country and give one formal lecture, each of them different, geared to the locality, and then be available for a couple days to talk informally to classes in those subjects in which I was competent to discuss: forest protection, timber harvesting, forest policy, forest entomology, and so on, things that I'm knowledgeable about. I had had this experience a number of times. I did this at North Carolina State. I did this at University of British Columbia. I did it at Cal. I did it at University of Missouri and some other places. Over a long period I did it. It was always a very interesting experience for me. The formal talk would be a public lecture not only for the students, but they'd invite people from the community in. I wanted these companies to underwrite this, so they wouldn't cost the university anything. I was going to charge them two thousand dollars for an appearance in which I'd pay all of my expenses, travel and otherwise to do it. I had about six or seven companies lined up that were interested in having me do this.

I wanted to go to these schools for one reason. I wanted to go there and impart the same kind of enthusiasm that I have for forestry to these kids that are the students now and who are going to be our future foresters. Because I don't think they're getting it from the

109 faculties of the schools today. It all fell apart, because we got into this terrible depression in our industry in the early '80s and I didn't have heart enough to go back and talk to any of these people and suggest they put out money, because they were struggling. These companies, most of them, were living on government timber that they'd paid too much for. They were having a hard time keeping their heads above water, so it disappeared, never happened. Now it's too late. No one would have me now. I'm too old. But boy we sure need somebody to do something like that. I always had the ability to enthuse the kids when I went to the universities in the past. I don't know that I could with today's university kids or not. They may be different. I don't know. I was doing it in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: Who's got better credentials for it? President of the Society, one of the founders of the tree farm program, the only one left of the original guys, the rest are all dead. I was one of the thirteen men present the day we certified the first tree farm of the United States. I'm the only survivor, because I was the only kid. I was twenty-six years old. They were men in their forties and fifties, and they're all gone. Ed Hayes was the last of them when he just died three years ago. With my background in protection, in logging, in policy. I appeared more than two hundred and fifty times as a witness before congressional committees in my life. Nobody in the history of or profession ever had more experience at it, not even the guys in the early days, because they didn't have as many pieces of kooky legislation in front of them in those days; the legislation was more sensible.

HKS: At Duke, and I realize this school is not typical, when they changed the name to School of the Environment, in terms of grade points and that sort of thing, quality jumped up 30 percent the next year. It made it much more attractive to the better students in terms of grade point and GREs and SAT scores. When you talk to those students, they're still interested in forestry but they see it as a piece of the broader environment, and they think forestry is limiting to them as a professional manager of environmental issues. They don't want the name "Forestry," but they want to study forests and oceans and atmospheres and urban areas and so forth. Very, very bright kids.

WDH: Sure. I bet they are. I bet they are. Well, most of them come from liberal arts colleges, don't they?

HKS: A lot of them do. A lot of them come out of sciences.

WDH: Do you know Doug McKinnon?

HKS: Yes.

WDH: I know him. He brings Duke students out West.

HKS: On the Laird, Norton trips.

110 WDH: Several times I've helped him arrange dinners and what not, and helped make his way at the Forestry Center. I don't know him well enough to know much about him. But I had some talks with him about it, and he's enthusiastic about the new thing now, but of course he's got to be enthusiastic if he's going to stay with something like this. But I don't know. I don't contribute money to Duke University anymore. I used to give money all the time for years, because I went there on a scholarship and was one of the pioneer students there. I was in the third class. But I've lost all interest in it frankly. And if the University of Washington doesn't shape up, I may lose interest in it, too. [chuckles] It's no longer the same kind of school as in your day and my day there.

HKS: Are there jobs for the foresters like us?

WDH: I don't know. I can't tell you that. I'm not that close to it anymore, but there probably aren't as many.

By the way, I started to tell you earlier about Thorud, when I had the call from Gessel and then Bethel talked to me in the same call. The reason that Gessel was calling me was that this branch of the Forest Service, the forest experiment station branch at Olympia. Where they've had men like Bob Curtis in mensuration and a fellow by the name of Miller in . These guys have both got notices their jobs are being terminated. They laid them off. They haven't got any money for it. They're not interested in mensuration or silviculture anymore. Philpott is the director there. Phil Briegleb and I went up to a meeting at Olympia and Phil, of course, is the retired director of that experiment station and has a continuing interest in it. He's a fine scientist and a guy with tremendous integrity. He and I went up to this meeting together. We drove up together to hear this fellow talk. Philpott was very articulate and very persuasive. He had written a letter that was kind of surreptitiously sent to friends of the station by fellows that thought they were kind of pushed in the corner, in which he said "We've got to have programs in the experiment station that are more attractive to the public." Not programs that are going to solve the problems that we've got in forestry. If you go back to the McNary-Sweeney Act and find out what the purpose of the experiment stations was, the authorization for the money is to find out how to lick the problems that occur in forestry regardless of what kind of a problem it is, whether it's utilization or protection or silviculture or whatever. But this guy pointed out that environmental considerations and all that in this letter. It was a hell of a poor letter, and of course it all leaked it out. Hell, everybody outside the Forest Service who was interested in this old subject got it right away. We all went to the meeting loaded for bear to take this guy on. He sent us all home thinking, "Geez, this guy's articulate and wants to do the right thing," but now they're beginning to lay men off, because they probably haven't got the money for it now. That's probably part of it. But here you've got two good men up there-.

I know both Miller and Curtis. Curtis is married to Allen Thompson's daughter, Helen. Allen Thompson, who was the city forester for the city of Seattle. I worked for Allen Thompson the summer of 1936 as a lookout and worked as a fire warden for him when I first got out of school for a few weeks. I've known the family and I've known his kids from the time they were little. His oldest boy's a forester. He's a graduate of our college too. Thompson, of course, is long dead now. Bob Curtis is a brilliant mensurationist.

111 He's got a doctor's degree in the subject and he's good. And he's done a hell of a lot of basic work there to help people work in second growth forests. Miller's a silviculturist. They're both out now.

Anyway that's what Gessel was calling about. He wanted to know if I was alert to this. Well, I was. He said, "What can you do about it?" I said, "I don't think there's a damn thing you can do about it. I wouldn't write a letter to a congressman or a senator and complain about it. In the first place, Congress is adjourned now." This was just last week. "Congress is adjourned, and you're just going to get a letter back from a staff member who doesn't know anything about it, saying it will be brought to the senator's attention when he returns at the first of January." [laughs]

HKS: Sure.

WDH: Meantime, these guys get laid off. Well, it's too bad. What we need is some leadership where we haven't got it right now in our profession. We haven't got it in the government anymore. There's a hell of a morale problem in the Forest Service right now.

HKS: Do you think the SAF provides leadership?

WDH: Not enough right now.

HKS: Could it?

WDH: I think so. I think it could articulate some of the needs. I think it's trying to. I think it's trying to, but I don't think that it's providing enough right now.

HKS: This SAF membership decline is the first time it ever happened, right?

WDH: People are losing interest in it. I've got a good friend. I won't mention his name. He's one of my best friends. He's six days younger than I am. He's a New York State College of Forestry graduate, been very successful in our profession, honest guy, competent man, lives in the state of Washington. He called me two weeks ago and said, "I'm going to quit the Society." I talked him into staying, but he says, "I'll do it one more time, because you say so, but that last issue of the Journal turned me off. Christ, what the hell are these guys up to?" I said, "Don't tell me. Write a letter to Banzhaf and tell him or write a letter to the president or write a letter to the editor."

There's a United States district court order issued by the United States district court in the district of northern California, San Francisco, that requires the Forest Service region, Region 5 in California, to employ women 48 percent of the professional positions.

HKS: The consent decree. Peterson's told me a lot about that in his interview.

WDH: Well now, I have no objection to 48 percent of the positions being filled by women if there are that many competent women to fill the positions. I don't think there

112 are that many women that are competent to fill that percentage of the positions there in that region right now. As many young women that have been trained in forestry in the last twenty years, I just don't think there are that many. But they've got quotas every place. You know, you've got to have a black, you've got to have a Hispanic, you've got to have a woman. Next thing it will be it'll be a homosexual or a Democrat. [both laugh]

HKS: Well, that will never happen. That's going too far.

WDH: [still laughing] Oh, god.

Industrial Forestry Association

HKS: I'd like you to comment briefly on the Industrial Forestry Association and how it was related to the other associations, how you did or did not coordinate policies. You testified in Congress how many times?

WDH: Oh, about two hundred and fifty.

HKS: Two hundred and fifty times. And you went through a process to know what your position was. I don't know if these were personal positions, who you checked with. Talk generically about how you did your job.

WDH: Well, our positions were taken as a result of the discussions in our board of directors, and our board of directors established our position on any legislation. Then it was up to me to articulate the position in the presentation for the committee.

HKS: What did you do with late breaking issues? The board couldn't get together every week and talk about these things. Did you have an executive committee? Did you phone or what?

WDH: We didn't have an executive committee for many years, and then suddenly somebody injected the idea that we ought to have one. I had observed other associations that had executive committees were bypassing their board with executive committees. So I made it very clear to our board that when they established an executive committee that the executive committee was to be useful mainly to allow the executives of the association to have that committee to counsel with in between meetings of the board. That it wasn't the function of the executive committee to set the policies. The board and the board alone should set the policies. I got that established very early right into our rules, and we never departed from it. Because I saw too many other associations that I was working with and observing continually where the executive committee arrogated to itself the authority that should have been with the board of directors, and they always got into trouble when they did.

HKS: Sure. I understand.

WDH: They really got into trouble with it. If you have strong personalities on the executive committee, they have a little tendency to want to take the association over.

113 We had strong personalities on ours. We had guys like Charles Bingham of Weyerhaeuser who was a tough nut.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: When he decided he wanted to go some place, by god he took on the whole world. First he'd take on George Weyerhaeuser, then he'd come and take on all the rest of us. But our executive committee worked very well. In between the meetings of our board, if something came up that was significant, why I would discuss it first with our president, always. Our president was a man that worked very closely with the staff of our association, and we always had pretty able guys as president. Only one or two in the whole time that I was employed there did we have fellows that were hard for the staff to work with. The rest of the time they were all very effective.

HKS: What's the role of NFPA? They're the national organization. If there's an issue in the Pacific Northwest, do they generally defer to the local associations?

WDH: If there was a local issue, of course, they didn't concern themselves with that unless they were asked by the local people to help on it. That was left up to the local people. If it were an item that concerned the Douglas-fir region, of course, we looked upon it as our function to take the leadership and we did. And if it was something of a national issue that they thought should be looked at, they would take the initiative. Although the initiative that they took was often stimulated by some of us who thought maybe that they were sitting on their tails and not taking ahold of something fast enough. So a local group like Southern Pine or Western Pine or IFA would take the initiative themselves and say, "Here. We've got a problem here, and you fellows ought to be working on it." Of course we had good cooperation through the boards of directors of all these associations which had representatives on the NFPA board.

Now for a long time, from 1949 when we were separated from the West Coast Lumbermen's Association as an independent organization, we did not financially support the National Forests Products Association. It was called National Lumber Manufacturers Association then, later they changed the name. But in the early 1970s IFA affiliated with NFPA. We became a federated association just like the West Coast Lumbermen's Association had been. It was gone by that time. It was Western Wood Products Association then, because Western Pine and West Coast had merged, and Southern Pine had changed its name to Southern Forest Products Association and so on. After Western Wood Products and American Plywood Association, IFA was the third largest member of NFPA. You see, what people didn't realize about our outfit compared with the trade associations, which we were not, we were strictly a forestry organization, was that instead of representing the product groups the others all did, like there were lumber manufacturers associations or floor manufacturers or shingle manufacturers or what not, we represented the commercial loggers, the non-operating timberland owners that merely grew timber, the pulp and paper segment of our industry, the lumber segment of our industry, the plywood segment of our industry, the shingle and shake segment of our industry, and the pole and piling industry. We had the whole works in this one big camp--the common issue of which was development of a permanent timber supply.

114

HKS: How were you different than the Western Timber Association in California?

WDH: Well, they were similar except that they only worked on government timber problems. They didn't have anything to do with private land.

HKS: Okay.

WDH: You see, we were the sponsors, we were the founders of the tree farm program. We stimulated it in our region and we got the National Lumber Manufacturers Association to pick it up and develop a national program. It was our outfit that did that when we were the West Coast Lumbermen's Association. We never gave up the sponsorship of it. As long as I worked there, we were still sponsoring the tree farm program. It's all been just been dissipated now into a bunch of funny arrangements all over the country, but we stuck with it from year one, from 1941 up to the time I retired in 1980. We were in it all the way up to our hip pockets. We had the largest proportion of privately owned land in any region in certified tree farms. In Douglas-fir, we had over 65 percent of the private land in the program. We had a tremendous thing going there.

Something we haven't talked about at all--as I told you earlier--our first preoccupation was with getting on top of the fire problem, and at the same time in '41 we started the nursery at Nisqually. By the time I retired we were growing forty million trees a year. We were growing forty million trees a year. Non-profit nursery. I love to get into a discussion with somebody from the environmental side of the world when they're talking about forestry and tell them that I had the privilege of being the manager of an organization that grew enough trees to reforest a million acres. How many trees did you grow? That really stops them, because they never grew a damn one. All they ever did was use them. [laughs]

HKS: Is there a fundamental difference between associations that focus on the land, as you did, as opposed to those that focus on products and manufacturing?

WDH: Oh, I think so. At one time, of course, the lumber manufacturers' associations like the West Coast Lumbermen's Association, Southern Pine Association, Western Pine, they were concerned with the land too, because they were all sponsors of the tree farm program within their regions. But in the pine region where there wasn't anywhere near as much private land in proportion to total land, government land was important, it was obvious that their most important function in timber supply was going to be working with the public agencies, namely the Forest Service. And that's what they did. They concentrated on that. Those associations also worked with us and through the National in fighting the government on the regulation issue. Of course they were joined together. I mean Southern Pine, Western Pine, and West Coast were the three big strong associations regionally that took on the national problem of regulation and focused their attention as the supporting members of National Lumber Manufacturers Association to give some leadership to it. And of course that's what they did. Wilson Compton spent his life fighting regulation, you know. It was one of the big things he had to do.

115 HKS: The tendency toward merger in associations is the same as it is in the companies themselves. Is this inevitable? Is this good? Are the associations stronger when they merge?

WDH: I think it's a good idea to not have competing associations in the same field. We had always a proliferation of associations in our region. You had the Western Forest Industries Association that was organized by a group of people that were opposed to cooperative sustained yield agreements originally. That's what brought them together. They were primarily made up of companies that owned no land or timber or very little and who were dependent almost a hundred percent upon outside sources of timber, mainly from public lands. They concentrated their efforts entirely upon dealing with the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service or the state forestry departments or the Indian Service, whoever their members were buying timber from. They didn't concern themselves with a lot of the policy issues that affected private lands like the regulation issue. They weren't the slightest bit interested. As a matter of fact, some of them thought that if the private lands were regulated it would put them in a better competitive position to buy government timber. [laughing] I don't know how they figured that, but that's what some of them used to say.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: There was a division there also in that some of the other associations used to fight capital gains on timber. Of course we were strong supporters for it, because we were one of the groups that helped bring it about in 1944, and we recognized that the significance of it was that it gave the private timberland owner, where he wasn't taxed out of the appreciation in the value of timber as income but as long-term capital gain, it gave him the capital with which to practice forestry. That's where we got our big shot in the arm in forestry in the United States. The Bailey Amendment to the revenue code in 1944--which Franklin Roosevelt vetoed and Alben Barkley, the senior senator from Kentucky overrode the veto with the best forestry speech ever made in the United States Senate because he understood it. Franklin Roosevelt, who claimed he was a tree farmer, didn't--that thing really put us on the road for practicing forestry. That's where we got the money to do the job in protection, to do the job in reforestation, to do the job a better utilization, to do the job in research to learn how to use everything better. You know, it was a great thing, and now it's been taken away from us, and it's dumb.

HKS: Associations. I don't know how to divide up the responsibilities generically, but you're a lobbyist. You testify in Congress. You're for or against things. You also try to educate your members.

WDH: Oh boy, do you ever.

HKS: And educate the public, right?

WDH: Sure. Absolutely. That's a very important-.

HKS: So those are your three main jobs?

116 WDH: That was the very important part of my job, to articulate the needs of forestry in our region to get public support for good sound public policies that would allow us to practice forestry: protection, reasonable taxes on private land, appropriations for the Forest Service to open up the country, to protect the country, to do the job, to get up to the allowable cut, and that sort of thing. You bet. Very important part of our job.

We never had formal job descriptions for the first thirty years that I worked there. We got into a period where four or five of our principals were continually wanting to reorganize everything, so we had review committees. We reviewed and reviewed and reviewed, and finally after these fellows had all these frustrating sessions that lasted for days it seemed like and wasted a lot of the association's staff time when it should have been busy doing something else, they finally said, "What the hell are we sitting here doing this for? Here's our executive. Let's ask Bill to put this thing together for us and tell us what we ought to do." I went to the drawing boards and drew up a bunch of charts and showed them what we should be doing that we weren't. I scared the hell out of them when I showed them how much money it was going to cost to do the things that we needed to do. I was talking about a million dollar a year budget, when our typical budget had been less than two hundred thousand dollars for years. And to add significantly to our staff, have specialists in all kinds of fields. I had the most elaborate thing you ever saw in your life. Well, it never came to pass. We went part way down the road, then they suddenly realized that we were getting into things that were maybe too much for us to handle.

HKS: Roughly, what would the budget be now?

WDH: Why, I haven't any idea. Of course the Industrial Forestry Association, you know, is no longer in existence. It's successor is called Northwest Forestry Association. And it has nothing to do with private lands. They're working exclusively on government timber problems, the public timber supply.

HKS: That's sort of the Western Timber Association approach, which is no longer the Western Timber Association.

WDH: Everybody goes through the name changes. Too bad. Industrial Forestry Association was a good name, and it was hard to get it. I can tell you a little interesting story about that. I was hired to come back to work after I had been to the Powell River Company on Canada in March 1, 1948, a week before I was thirty-three years old, to become the chief forester for the Douglas-fir industry. It was really something, you know. It was a hell of a big job on a kid's shoulders. Unbeknownst to me, because they never cut me in on it and I guess it's all right. I was a little bit mad at them at the time, but looking back now I'm not at all. A number of the principals in the industry including Colonel Greeley had decided that the time had come to take the forestry organization that had been in existence since the NRA under the West Coast Lumbermen's Association and jointly supported by the Pacific Northwest Loggers Association, to take it out of the associations and put long pants on it and create a forestry organization. One day in the spring of 1949 Colonel Greeley came to visit with me, and said, "Bill, we're going to start a new association, and you're going to run it." He told me the whole story.

117 I said, "What are we going to call it?" He said, "We're going to call it Forest Conservation Committee of Pacific Northwest Forest Industries." Good god!

HKS: [laughs]

WDH: I said it to myself, I didn't say this to the Colonel-.

HKS: You always call him the "Colonel," never Bill.

WDH: Oh, yes. I never called him Bill, no sir.

HKS: Did anyone call him Bill?

WDH: Some of his contemporaries, but not too many. No, no. The Colonel was a man that everybody respected greatly. Calling him Colonel, using that title, was a sign of respect to him. It's interesting though, when he answered the phone he never said "Colonel Greeley speaking," he always said "Greeley speaking." My office was right next to his for a long time when I first worked there, so through these glass partitions I could hear him talking.

HKS: Anyway, he was telling you about this new organization.

WDH: He did. In the first of July 1949, the Forest Conservation Committee of Pacific Northwest Forest Industries came into being. The arrangement was that the managers, or the staff, of the West Coast Lumbermen's Association and Pacific Northwest Loggers were to sell the memberships in it. They set up a dues schedule of two cents per thousand on log production. They set up a board that would be representative of the peeler logs, of saw logs, of pulp logs, and so on. We started out with a production of about two billion feet a year at the beginning. We had about forty members. All the major companies were involved in it like Weyerhaeuser, Crown-Zellerbach, Rayonier, St. Regis Paper Company, and some others, although some of the big ones didn't come in right away. We had to go out and sell them. And Colonel Greeley and I took on the job to go around and sell the memberships. Anyway, it was a fight but we did get the name changed to Industrial Forestry Association.

The piling king in Oregon was a fellow by the name of Ernie Whipple and he lived in Drain. Ernie Whipple had an office right in the main street in Drain. When you come down old highway 99, there's a bunch of towns in Oregon where you come down and then you turn right angles to go through the town. The highway went right through. As you came into Drain from the north, Ernie had his office there. I don't think he had any corporation name. He was the principal piling shipper out of Oregon, and he had one arm. Instead of being in his office, there was a card room two doors away, and he'd play pinochle all day long with guys in there. But he had his own private phone from his office wired down there, so when the people called up to buy piling, they were in the middle of the pinochle game--that was the interesting thing--he was selling piling over the phone to these guys all over the country, because he was the fellow that could provide up to a hundred and twenty foot piling. You know, big long stuff, special stuff.

118 And everybody knew he could get it. The kind of timber that was down the Coast Range there, it was suitable for that.

So I had this terrible job to try to sell Ernie a membership in the Forest Conservation Committee of Pacific Northwest Forest Industries in the middle of the pinochle game. And it's embarrassing to ask people to join something anyway. In a way, nobody is very forward about it.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: I never was a super salesman in that sort of thing. I had to do it, or we would never have survived, but I never liked it. I never enjoyed it. And I don't think any of my colleagues did except one. We had one kid that was good at it. But I said, "Ernie, we'd like to interest you in joining the Forest Conservation Committee." "Hell," he says, "I'm on too many committees now." Then the phone rang and he sold some piling. So he wrote the order down with his one good hand, said to the guy, "Yeah, we'll take care of it." And he says to me, "What was that we were talking about." Well, I said, "We'd like to get you to join the Forest Conservation Committee." He said, "Forest Conservation Committees. What the hell is that?" I said, "It's an association." He said, "Then why the hell don't you call it that?" [laughs] I used that story with the board of directors. It convinced them that we ought to get rid of this damn committee name. Because you can't sell people memberships in committees.

HKS: Sure. I understand that.

WDH: It's terrible. But the Colonel and I almost came to a parting of the ways over that issue. He insisted, and he was pretty insistent when he was insistent. He was a full colonel in every respect. [laughs] My god, he wanted to keep the word "Conservation" there. Two or three years later, before he died and when he was sick. He had cancer of the prostrate which killed him. He had had the operation for it, but apparently it had been too late or it was too far along or something, and he had been invited by Crown- Zellerbach to come down and make a talk at the dedication of their research laboratory at Camas. When he came down from Port Gamble, where he lived on his tree farm, he came to see me before he went over to Camas to make the talk. It's the last time I saw him. This was in 1955, and he was in poor shape. He looked gaunt, and he was in pain. He was suffering from it. And only six weeks later he passed away. I never saw him again after that. But during that visit, he said, "I died hard on that name change, but we did the right thing."

HKS: Good.

WDH: That's the kind of guy he was. Once he called me on the phone from his office in Seattle, my office in Portland. He said, "What are you doing on this Timber Access Road thing? Are you undercutting what I've been doing?" I explained to him what I had been doing. I wasn't undercutting anything. I was working additionally to what he was doing, because he continued to work on things like that, and he wasn't much of a team man in that respect. When he got interested in a thing like that, he would use his contacts and get on the phone and call guys in Washington, D.C., that he knew that he

119 thought would be helpful. Well, I argued with him a little bit, nicely, you know, very respectfully over the phone. The next day I got a memorandum apologizing for blowing his top, but that shows you the kind of a man he was. A big, big man. I tell you, Pete, when that man was built the mold was broken in our business. There will never again be a man as good as he was. He was just it.

Congressional Testimony

HKS: Do you have any anecdotes you'd like to give on testifying? It must have been-.

WDH: Oh, god!

HKS: It's hard for us who've never testified to understand the time constraints, the hierarchy, you must be deferential to this committee that you probably don't respect half of.

WDH: You bet.

HKS: And all the games they play.

WDH: You're the petitioner. You're the petitioner. You've got to treat them with great respect.

HKS: So describe in a generic sense what testimony's really like. There's oral testimony and there's written testimony and there's all this that we read about in the civics books, but none of us have ever experienced that.

WDH: Well, it's a real interesting experience to have.

HKS: How did you do your first time? Were you nervous?

WDH: Oh, sure. My first testimony was on a bill to study the size of the Olympic National Park. It was held by what was then called the Committee on Public Lands of the House of Representatives, later the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee which it is yet. And they held a hearing at Rosemary Lodge on Lake Crescent in Clallam County, Washington. It was in 1947. And Warren Tilton, my boss, should have been the witness, but he said, "I think you ought to do it. Wear your preachers suit, so you look sincere." I had a blue suit that he called my preachers suit. [both laugh] And the chairman of the committee, the Republicans controlled the House in 1946 and '7. In the '46 election, in '47, and '48 the Republicans had the House. I guess that's the last time they had it. Joe Martin of Massachusetts was the speaker. A congressman by the name of Welch from San Francisco was the chairman of this subcommittee that held the hearing. And Russell Mack, who had just been elected from the third congressional district in Washington who was a newspaper publisher, he published the Hoquiam Washingtonian at Hoquiam. He had just been elected to Congress, and he was under pressure from the people in his district to examine the size of the park. You know, the park has always been a controversial thing, because it had so much commercial

120 timberland from the adjacent national forest that was put into it. People in the Olympic Peninsula felt that Roosevelt and Senator Wallgren really did it to them, because they took at least three hundred and fifty thousand acres of land in there whose highest and best use to society was the practice of forestry and put it into a park that to this day no one can really use, because it's largely inaccessible. You know, there's one road that runs up the Hoh River fourteen miles, and there's one that runs up the Hurricane Ridge, and the rest of the park is a wilderness park. So it doesn't get anywhere near the play that a park of its size or of its beauty and aesthetics would entitle it to, because it's so inaccessible to most people.

HKS: Do you have a sense of an adversarial thing, the other witnesses are going to be hostile? Or do you run through and you're out the door, and you never really hear the other side?

WDH: Oh, no. When I go to a hearing, I stay through the whole thing. I listen to the other witnesses. I listen to all of them. I take notes like mad. I've got boxes full of notes that I took at things like that, because I would report those things to our people to let them know what we were up to and to educate them partly as to what the problems were and what we were up against in testifying on all the propositions that affected forestry.

Yes, I was afraid at the first hearing. It was my first experience. I was what? I was thirty-two years old when I testified the first time, and then I didn't testify again for two years, in 1949 when I testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee to get the money for the spruce budworm spraying that we were doing that I talked about earlier. After that I began steadily in 1952. The National Lumber Manufacturers Association was wanting somebody to come in and articulate the need for timber access roads in the national forests. I went before the Public Works Committees of both the House and the Senate on the very same day. I prepared the testimony on the airplane coming back, because they called me and said, "You've got to be here in twenty-four hours," and that's the way it happened.

HKS: How do you get to be a witness? Do you volunteer?

WDH: You have to ask permission to appear, unless the committee asks you to come. Now, I've had it both ways. Once I had established my credibility as a witness in forestry matters, I was in demand by the committees where members of a committee or sometimes the chairman would proselytize me and ask me to come and appear before them on a subject because of the information that they thought I could provide them. Other times, when the bill was coming up like the Wilderness Bill for example, you'd have to write or telephone or telegraph to the chairman of the committee, or subcommittee if it were a subcommittee holding the hearing, for permission to appear. Then he would respond by telephone or letter or telegram and give you permission to appear. In the earlier days when I was doing it they didn't require you to provide copies of prepared testimony in advance. In the last ten years that I was doing it, sometimes committees would require you to furnish them with ten, fifteen, or twenty copies of your prepared statement in advance. Sometimes that was in hearings where you were going to be adversarial to the position of the committee. Because they would then have

121 your stuff in advance, and then they would give it to their staff to prepare questions in ways to break down your testimony. That was kind of fun.

HKS: Did you have a sense that the written testimony or the oral testimony had the most influence on the outcome of things? Or couldn't you tell?

WDH: Well, I think you can. It varied with the circumstance, the issue, the personalities involved. I learned very early that these people that got up and read these long-winded statements, no one paid any attention to them. So I very early learned to ask for my entire statement to be included in part of the hearing record, and then I'd say, "Mr. Chairman, I'd like to make a few comments." I was articulate enough that I could do that very well and get their attention, because I could briefly explain what I was there to talk about and why I was there and why we believed as we did on the issue and that sort of thing. So I think my oral testimony was a lot more effective than a lot of the written. On the other hand, if there needed to be statistical information to make the case, I always had it in my prepared statement. I was always one of the best prepared witnesses that appeared before the committee on either side of any issue. I often told people after I'd been doing it for about twenty years that I was the best informed man in the room on either side of the table, and I was. I was never ill-prepared to go. I was always ready to go there and take them on. I had lots of repartee, exchange with members of the committee some of which were unpleasant, because you were an adverse witness. And I also had the great fun of having fellows pump your tires up like you were the deity himself on the issue. That was a lot of fun when they would do that.

HKS: You probably got to know some of the committee members pretty well...

WDH: Oh boy, did I ever.

HKS: ...when you testified on many occasions for the same committee over the years.

WDH: Sure. I testified principally before the committees that were then called the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. It was the same on both sides. The Senate committee's got a different name now, House committee's the same. The Committees on Banking and Currency that had the housing legislation and things of that sort. The Ways and Means Committee on taxation in the House, Finance Committee in the Senate. The Committee on Agriculture and Forestry in the Senate, and the Committee on Agriculture in the House because they had forestry subcommittees that handled forestry matters. I guess that's about all. I guess maybe a time or two before the Commerce Committee. The Commerce Committee held some hearings several times on timber problems when Magnuson of Washington was the chairman. I can tell you a very interesting story on that one if you want an anecdote.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: Maggie held some hearings in, well they had one in Washington, D.C.; one in Lewiston, Idaho; and one in Olympia. It was held in the Hall of Representatives in the Washington State Capitol, and it was during a period when the Forest Service was not getting its allowable cut in the market. The audience was people who were buying

122 government timber. The place was packed. There were a thousand people in that big room, a thousand people. I made some remark about, "No one wants to kick the hell out of Smoky Bear, but we're interested here in seeing to it that the monies that are appropriated are used for the purpose that they're appropriated. One of the things that hasn't been done is that the Forest Service has not been aggressive enough in getting out the salvage after one of these catastrophes like a big blow down or fire or insect infestation even though you've appropriated monies for it." And Warren, of course, was on the Appropriations Committee too. He was up at the speaker's stand where he was sitting, and I was sitting up there adjacent to him. That's where they had the witness. They had the witness come up there, because they had a public address system so everybody could hear. He had this microphone on this big, long arm. When I made this remark, it excited the audience and they applauded which doesn't happen too often in congressional hearings and always makes the chairman kind of unhappy if somebody does that. It kind of interferes with things. So when the applause died down, I said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman. I didn't mean to invoke applause here." He swung the microphone away from me and says, "You son of a bitch," [both laugh] and he brought it back and says, "Please proceed, Mr. Hagenstein." [laughs again]

HKS: When for example you're testifying on something that affects or looks at the Forest Service, have you already worked with the regional forester in advance? I mean do you have good relationships?

WDH: Oh, sure.

HKS: They knew how you felt and you really had the background and understood their point of view?

WDH: Oh, we never had any difficulties with anybody in the regional office of the Forest Service or the State Office of the BLM or with the State Forestry Departments or with the Indian Service. If we needed information from them to help make the case for what we were trying to do, they always provided the information to us. We had a friendly relationship.

HKS: Did he ever come to you and say, "Look, we need your help"?

WDH: Oh! All the time. Hell, yes. On appropriations, you know, they were proselytizing us all the time, and most often we'd give it to them. It depends. I mean, if it was something®RM70¯ that we didn't think that they ought to have, we wouldn't do it. But if it was something we thought that was for the good of the advancement of forestry on the public lands, we worked our can off on it. Nobody worked any harder as an individual private citizen of the United States than I did on behalf of getting the transportation system in the national forests really up to snuff. I spent thirty years of my life working on that. We were successful from beginning in 1952 when I first testified before the Public Works Committees on the authorizations. We raised the annual authorization for roads for the national forests from twelve and a half million to a hundred and seventy million dollars a year. Once we got the authorization, which in the trade we called "the hunting license," then we'd go before the Appropriations Committee and help them get the money under those authorizations. I did that

123 continuously. Nobody did any more of it than our association anywhere, or any other private citizen in the United States than I. Because I believed in what we were doing. I knew damn well we would never get forestry in the national forests until they were accessible. When you can get there to protect them, to harvest the timber, and to reforest it. At the same time, open the forests up for all the other uses, recreational uses, and so on. We published a booklet on the timber access roads for the Forest Service, and they distributed it. It didn't have our name in it at all. I helped them put it together, helped write it. They furnished the pictures mostly. We printed it in our print shop, and they distributed thousands of copies of it to people, to newspapers, and citizen groups, and everybody to build up public support for extending the timber access road system. We did that right along, that sort of thing.

I have to tell you about the very first time that I testified on the timber access road thing in 1952. I testified before the House Committee. The chairman was a congressman from Baltimore, George Fallon. And the committee kept me a long time, asked me a lot of questions, so I was almost an hour late getting over to the other side to the Senate Committee where they were waiting for me. I was the only witness. And when I got there everybody was gone except one senator, Senator Spessard Holland of Florida who was a big, fine looking guy, dead now, but he was a wonderful man. The committee hearing consisted of him sitting there, me sitting here, and a stenotypist sitting here. He said, "Let's just have a conversation about this." I made the case, and he supported the hell out of us. I appeared before him several times after that.

Some years later, about 1963, the Seaboard Airline Railroad used to have a forestry tour in the South, you probably know about it, in which they would invite the executives of all the major corporations that do business in the southeastern United States, but including some of the national groups like General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler and what not. The one I went to was at Jacksonville, Florida, in which they'd have a big dinner and they'd provide the food for everybody. Next day, they'd take you on a train trip someplace on their line, but you had to buy a ticket. Under the ICC rules you couldn't get free transportation unless you were a rail. Then they took us out to Live Oak, Florida, which is west of Jacksonville. Another train brought the whole Florida legislature the other way, and we met. They had a school holiday. All the school buses were there to take us from the railroad station. These two trains met. The school band was there to welcome, the town welcomed all these people. The legislature was about two hundred members and state officials. There were about four hundred of us on the other one, the business people that came, guests of the railroad. They took us out in the woods to put on a big demonstration of forestry and what they were doing.

The governor of Florida was the master of ceremonies. On the platform were Russell Erickson who was the president of Rayonier, Bill Adams who was the president of St. Regis--both members of IFA, Senator Holland was there, senior senator from Florida. So the president of the railroad, his name was John Smith, introduced me to Governor Bryant. Governor Bryant turns and says, "I'd like to have you meet Senator Holland." And Senator Holland in the presence of these two paper company presidents, members of ours, said, "You don't have to introduce me to Bill Hagenstein. We call him 'Timber Access Road Bill' in the Public Works Committee." [both laugh] You couldn't have

124 written a greater script. It really impressed the hell out of these two guys from New York. [laughs again]

HKS: Good.

WDH: That's the kind of relationship that I had with some of those men. With Holland. Of course he was helpful to us. He was the chairman of the subcommittee on roads in the Public Works Committee, and he did a great job for us. He didn't have the personal need for doing it for Florida, because national forest land isn't that important there.

HKS: That's right.

WDH: He knew it was important out our way. So it was a great experience in establishing relationships with men like that, and they were so helpful in doing what we were trying to accomplish.

HKS: Let's return to the outline. Earlier we talked mainly about the issues of the '60s. Let's move into the '70s. I don't remember when you retired, but you-.

WDH: I retired on the first of April 1980.

National Environmental Policy Act

HKS: Okay, so you're on the firing line here. The '70s start on January first with NEPA, National Environment Policy Act. What had been your position? Did you testify on that?

WDH: No, we never did, no. I think the NFPA must have.

HKS: It was really a sleeper, right?

WDH: It wasn't discussed very much. Yeah, you're right. It wasn't discussed very much. Nobody was really aware of what was really up. I think that's right.

HKS: So we have NEPA, and you get the Council on Environmental Quality. The EPA comes out of this and impact statements.

WDH: That's the worst thing that came out of it. We had John McGuire speak at our annual meeting of the IFA when he had been chief for about a year. And I don't recall exactly what year it was now, but John told our people that in the previous year that the Forest Service had had to spend twenty-six million dollars preparing environmental impact statements, and that not one cent of money had been appropriated to them for that purpose, so they had had to tithe all the other appropriations they had for every other purpose for management of the national forests. Now that was a terrible eye opener to all of us. Of course, we had begun to notice the environmental impact statements, because they were slowing up a lot of activities. They slowed up the for example. Every time there was a disaster that needed salvage logging, if

125 anybody insisted that they file an environmental impact statement, they'd put a big crew of people together and start doing it. Oh Christ, we had enough of those things in our office when I retired piled up in our conference room that would be a stack-. I'd say we had about ten cords of them. [laughs] Awful, just awful.

HKS: They're huge, huge things.

WDH: Just awful. As I told somebody I guess maybe in a talk I made to some group, "The great amount of money and effort that's put into these things, never grew another tree, never prevented a fire, never built a road to get a country kid to a better school over a better or safer road, never provided consumers with products to build a house or do anything else, never paid any taxes to support schools or roads or any local function of government; all it does is add to the cost of everything and to the value of nothing. It's a hell of an imposition on the economy, and it's a thing that has unnecessarily added to the inflation that we are always troubled with."

HKS: Someone told me that from the standpoint of forest land, the problem with NEPA is it is aimed at urban issues. It's urban oriented. I mean, most of the people and the most of the environmental disruption is in urban scenes, and Congress was addressing that.

WDH: Probably.

HKS: When you apply it on the land, it's not set up for that.

WDH: I think that's a good analysis of it. I think that's right. I hadn't thought of it that way. Carried to the extreme. You're right. It was really the theory of the thing, the philosophy of the thing, was to address the problems of people living in crowded conditions where you wanted to clean up the air, clean up the water, clean up the whole environment in every way that would make the world a more livable place. But when they extend it off out into the boonies, then it becomes an imposition on the people that live in town but they don't know it. They don't know it.

HKS: Was there any concerted effort to repeal or amend NEPA that you're aware of?

WDH: No.

HKS: Or was it accepted?

WDH: No, but let me give you one illustration where I personally made a substantial effort to get some modification of it. I made a talk someplace down in Ashland, Oregon, at some kind of a conference down there held at Southern Oregon College, that the National Environmental Policy Act should be amended to require that anyone who insisted on the act as a basis for litigating against an agency of the government, to prevent them from doing something that they proposed to do like building a dam or a road or fighting a fire or salvaging timber or anything where it could be construed as having an effect upon the human environment, the quality of the human environment which the law states. That the law should be amended to require that the parties

126 bringing the litigation put up a bond of sufficient size that in the event that they lost the case, all the economic disruptions that had occurred because of them by slowing up and stopping the salvage, the loss of the timber, for receipts for the counties and that sort of thing they'd pick up the check. The people who were damaged would come out whole. I got a hell of a lot of support from a bunch of politicians who were in the audience. They thought that was a hell of a good idea.

I went back and wrote the thing up in a little bit more detail. I went before the board of the National Forest Products Association and asked them to approve the idea in principle. I'm not sure, but I may have been the chairman of the Forestry Advisory Committee of NFPA at the time, because I was a couple times. I'm not sure of this, but I was a member of the committee. I was a member of it for thirty years. But I got the board to approve it. I said, "If you approve this thing, now, and we get someone to introduce the legislation, you've got to commit yourselves that you'll go and do the job, not only of getting witnesses out to testify in its favor and make the case for it, but also do the job of going around and lobbying the members of Congress in order to get it enacted, because there will be a hell of a lot of opposition to this by the people that are continually litigating irresponsibly under the aegis of the NEPA." The board went for it. But the staff of NFPA thought it was an impossible thing to do, and they never did a god damned thing about it. They just let it rot. I think it was a good idea. I think it was an equitable idea. Why shouldn't anybody who in the Sierra Club or any other environmental organization that hasn't anything to lose themselves, but through litigating prevent the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management or any other public agency from doing something that society needs and that ought to be done as a matter of good management of resources? They lose the suit, why shouldn't they pick up the check for the economic damage they've done to the people in the communities that were involved?

HKS: The problem might have been that-.

WDH: It would make responsible litigants out of them. We don't have responsible litigants now on these appeals of that kind of thing.

HKS: The hesitation may have been that Congress and others may have seen this as establishing a precedent. When hit by a Shell oil truck, I can't sue for damages unless I put up a bond. Maybe it's an analogy to other kinds of litigations.

WDH: It could be, could be.

HKS: Anyhow it didn't happen.

WDH: It's an idea that I thought was worthwhile, but you're right, it didn't happen.

HKS: Very recently--I've lost track of how it's worked out--but in terms of national forests plans, you can't appeal-. Something about the appeals process.

WDH: They've modified it recently, but they haven't gotten away with it. I mean, the Forest Service modified it, because they were just being besieged by these things.

127

HKS: Sure.

WDH: Their hands were tied on everything they tried to do. One good example is the city of Portland gets its water from the Mount Hood National Forest, from Bull Run reserve that was established by Congress about 1904. The city owns a little land up there, and the city's got the dams and all that, but most of the land, most of the watershed is national forest. The Forest Service started selling timber up in there around thirty, thirty-five years ago. In November of 1983, now that's nine years ago next month, there was a big blow down in there, a couple hundred million feet of timber blown down. It's old growth timber. The Forest Service hasn't salvaged more than 15 percent of that yet. You know what's happening to it. It's deteriorating like mad. The bugs are in it and the rots are in it. It's mainly because they've had so damn many appeals by people that don't want them to do any logging in the watershed. These people appeal and say, well, they want to take the salvage out but they've got to cut some green trees when they take the down stuff too. Well they do. If you're in there on high lead ground, you're going to have to clearcut, you're going to have to take the rest of it in there, to clean it up. Nothing said about the minute they get it out of there, they will reduce the fire hazard and reforest the area and all that sort of thing. But the appeals have stopped it.

The Forest Service itself is scared. It's scared to go in there and move. Now you've got a city councilman in Portland who's running for re-election in this election, you know, next week. I didn't vote for him. He didn't have any competition. I left it blank, because I don't like the bastard. But he's against forestry in the watershed. He said, "We don't want anybody to interfere with our water supply." Well, my god, all you have to do is go north of the city of Seattle, it's got the best water system of any major city in the United States and they've been logging, for god's sake, for ninety years in the watershed up there, and it's beautiful. It's a good watershed. You know, the water is good quality and there hasn't been a case of typhoid fever in Seattle since 1910.

Earth Day

HKS: Earth Day. What did you think of Earth Day at the time? You must have spoken out on or written about it in terms of your responsibilities.

WDH: Better Environment Through Forestry. There's one of the best things I ever wrote. We distributed three hundred and seventy-five thousand copies of that, through our members, in the public schools in western Washington and western Oregon on Earth Day. That's what we did.

HKS: SAF has adopted "Every day is Earth Day for Foresters." I've seen it as bumper stickers.

WDH: I've got one of them.

HKS: So you didn't see Earth Day as a radical thing?

128

WDH: Not then. But we participated. That's the way we did it. Right there. [gestures to booklet] We printed them. It cost us a fortune to do that, because our printer had to work overtime. We thought that people might take fifteen, twenty thousand copies of that, you know. And we distributed three hundred and seventy-five thousand copies of that to school kids on Earth Day.

HKS: When you do something like that, do you get measurable feedback? Do you monitor in some way?

WDH: All we knew is the number of schools and the names of the schools that did it. We don't know how people reacted to it. But I still get requests for this. Some people in California asked for permission to reproduce it and put their name on it, and they modified it just a little bit for their own situation. They're are some people in Idaho who did the same thing. So that same theme was printed.

Let me tell you how we got the title Better Environment Through Forestry. When I was president of SAF, the last annual meeting--they call them conventions now--was at Miami Beach. It was my valedictory, my last talk to the society, so I wrote a little piece. And my wife Ruth and I were discussing it one night and I said, "I always was intrigued by Dupont." They had a slogan in their advertising for a long time: "Better living through chemistry."

HKS: Sure.

WDH: And I said, "Why can't we get something that we could get forestry into?" She says, "You can. Why don't you say 'Better Environment Through Forestry'?" It was her idea, not mine.

HKS: There's the name.

WDH: We've been using it since. I still use it. One day shortly after Earth Day had occurred Jack Brown, who was a P.R. man for Crown-Zellerbach and now works for James River, was in my office on something. He was seeking some information that I was helping him get. And I said, "You know, Jack, our industry ought to put bumper stickers out. I don't like bumper stickers too well, but people read them. It's good advertising for everything." He said, "Well, what would you put on one?" I said, "'Forestry is good for Oregon.' 'Forestry is good for Washington.'" "By god," he says, "it is. Let's do it." So we designed a bumper sticker for the two states, one for Washington and one for Oregon. "Forestry is good for Oregon." "Forestry is good for Washington." And we distributed a half million copies of those. We printed them all in our own print shop. It cost us a lot of money to do it, but we sold them to our members. We sold them at cost, and they cost about two cents a piece or something like that. We distributed a half million copies.

HKS: That's a lot of bumpers.

129 WDH: I saw them for years. I've still got a couple of them. We never had a public relations man. We all did that. We all worked on it. I didn't know that I was in the public relations business, but I was in it up to my ass pockets really. We got permission to hire an advertising agency to help us. Well, for two or three years they did. And I spent most of my time doing all the work anyway--even with them. Then they'd charge us 16 and 2/3 percent for everything they did for you over and above their fee. They've got these things that they do. If you write a press release, they charge you for it. All kinds of things. Their press releases weren't sexy enough. They weren't anywhere near as good as the ones I could write. So I talked our people into letting us hire a P.R. man.

During the period that we had the agency, we had a man who had been in New York for years and was wise to the use of the airwaves of both television and radio for public service messages, which under the FCC rules people have got frequencies allocated to them both for radio and television have to provide some percentage of their total time for public service. So we prepared a bunch of public service television things on forestry and for radio. For a couple thousand dollars we prepared about sixteen thirty- second radio public service messages, and we got a hundred radio stations in Oregon and Washington to use them free. Free for two thousand bucks. Then these stations would write to us and let us know how many times they'd use them and all that sort of thing, and we'd compile it. It was a fantastic thing. We made a television message, one minute in color. It cost us about twenty-eight hundred dollars to make one, and we made about three of them. It really impressed Weyerhaeuser because a Seattle station showed one of these things four times in the middle of a world series game, which has got to be prime time with people watching the baseball game. Bingham wrote me a letter and congratulated us on it. Weyerhaeuser had never done anything like that. They hadn't done any T.V. advertising at the time. They began to do that after that on their own. Of course theirs wasn't free; they had to buy theirs. But we got all kinds of use of that stuff. As long as you weren't promoting a product, promoting a company, public service message furnished by the Industrial Forestry Association and that's all. We had them on protection. We had them on admonishing people about fire during the fire season, appropriate for "Keep Washington Green," "Keep Oregon Green." We had things about the insects. I ought to send you a set of those. When I get home I will. I'll send you a set of the radio tapes.

We were the first association in the United States to do that in our industry, and we got a lot of the others doing the same thing, and it became a common thing. Now you can't do it very much anymore. The radio stations and the television stations won't give you much chance. And when I was president of SAF, we did it there. We began to do it there, because I had done it in the association before I was president of SAF. I'm going back a little bit into the '60s here.

HKS: That's all right.

WDH: You want to work on the '70s.

Monongahela

130 HKS: Generically it's the same. It's how you responded to things. Okay, now we get into the biggy, at least it looks that way. Monongahela, Bitterroot, clearcutting. Clearcutting had been an issue in the '60s, but it really seemed to peak out in the early '70s with the Monongahela.

WDH: God, the Monongahela mess.

HKS: Did you go back to the Monongahela to see it on the ground?

WDH: No.

HKS: I've had different reports of what it looked like. Some say it was twenty acres. Some say it was two hundred acres.

WDH: You know what it was, it was a squirrel hunting area. They clearcut the white oak, and that took the acorns away. The squirrel hunters couldn't find squirrels anymore, because the squirrels moved from there to where the acorns were. [laughs] White oak is an intolerant species. If you want to reproduce it, you've got to clearcut it. And that's why the Forest Service did it there.

HKS: I see.

WDH: But Senator Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, who was the senior member of the Senate, his squirrel hunting and drinking buddies complained about it and he made a cause célèbre out of it. He introduced legislation to do away with it and all that sort of thing.

HKS: It's pretty obvious, watching on the Forest Service side of the Monongahela, that its legal advisers, Department of Justice or whoever that was, grossly misunderstood what was going on, because they thought they were going to win.

WDH: Oh, I know they did.

HKS: And they really didn't work very hard on it, if you read the brief.

WDH: I know about that.

HKS: If it had been a term paper from a student of mine, I would have turned and back and said, "Do it over and get it right." It was really pretty slipshod work.

WDH: It was their own attorneys that did this, not the Justice Department. It was the solicitor of the Department of Agriculture and Raleigh Tremaine and those fellows, you know, that were attached to the Forest Service.

HKS: Were you following this at the time? Did you foresee it as a big issue?

WDH: We followed it because of the clearcutting thing. I'll say we followed it. The talk was that when that court decision was made in the Fourth Circuit Court, in Richmond,

131 Virginia, or wherever it was, that precluded the clearcutting in West Virginia, and North and South Carolina, and Virginia national forests. We saw what effect that would have if that were extended to the Ninth Circuit, our circuit.

HKS: I see.

WDH: I made all kinds of talks about it. We put out all kinds of press releases. I wrote articles about it. We were interviewed by television stations. We were interviewed by newspapers. We were interviewed by radio stations. I don't think that there's any issue that I ever had so much demand on me from other people to tell them about it. It really got to be a hot thing. We figured out what effect it would have upon employment by reducing the amount of timber from the national forests in our region. It was a very significant thing. It really would have been a disaster for a hundred communities in our region. We articulated that every way we knew how, all over the country. Of course I was a witness before the Congress in all the hearings that were held that were related to the subject at all.

We had a big group. The NFPA had a big group before the Senate Interior Committee. I guess they hadn't changed the name yet, it was still the Senate Interior Committee. It was a subcommittee on public lands that held it, and Senator Church of Idaho was the chairman. We had a delegation of about eight or ten of us to work as a panel. The leader was Lowry Wyatt of Weyerhaeuser who was a very good guy and a very articulate man and a guy that everybody liked to work with. He had a lot nicer personality than some of the other Weyerhaeuser boys, so that he was the kind of a man who was pleasing to work with. He was president of NFPA then. He could weld a team better than anybody else among the principals at the time. We were all there together. He was one of the witnesses. The other principal witness from the industry was Bob Hansberger, who was then the president of Boise Cascade. Then there were a number of the rest of us, people like George Staebler who was a Weyerhaeuser forest research man. Mark Schoknecht of St. Regis and Casey Westell of Packaging Corporation. George Craig was there for Western Timber Association. I was there. And four or five others.

HKS: So you felt at the time that there was a real possibility that that might spread to nationally.

WDH: Oh, you bet we did.

HKS: The Forest Service was considering going to the Supreme Court but decided not to do that. Were you working with the Forest Service on a strategy at that time?

WDH: Well, only to this extent, we talked with them about it of course, not in Washington, but locally in the region and the effect on the regional foresters. But when Butz was secretary of agriculture--and this would be when John McGuire was chief--we got an emergency call late one afternoon. I was up in Nisqually in our office. I got the call from Secretary Butz himself. He'd run me down, and he wanted to know if I could be in Washington at ten o'clock the next morning in his office. This was about two in the afternoon in Nisqually, and I had to go home to get clothes in Portland, and at seven

132 o'clock that night I was on airplane. I went to San Francisco then flew nonstop to Washington all night, and went to the secretary's office without even shaving.

HKS: Does the government reimburse for expenses in a situation like that?

WDH: No. There were others that went with it. He invited Bingham of Weyerhaeuser, who by that time was in charge of their timberlands. And George Staebler went along. Arnold Ewing of Northwest Timber Association, Stub Stewart of Bohemia, and a couple of others were invited to this thing. Then the NFPA crowd were involved in it. We met with the secretary and with John McGuire in the secretary's office ten o'clock the following morning, and then we went and talked to the staff of the Council on Environmental Quality. This was the time when Nixon was president. On the president's desk was an order from the Council on Environmental Quality, an executive order that if the president signed it, would preclude the clearcutting on the national forests.

HKS: The president has that authority?

WDH: Oh, yes, he did. This would be an executive order.

HKS: I guess so. The Forest Service acts under the President.

WDH: This was when this god damned Russell Train was the head of the CEQ. And they had this guy, Alm, that worked there. Alvin Alm is his name. Well, I get back at Russell Train. He's a director of Union Carbide Corporation. I'm a stockholder, and I always vote against him when they nominate him for a director. [both laugh] And I always write on the proxy card "If you'd like to know why I'm against Russell Train, here's my phone number." [both laugh again] Of course, no one reads those things.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: Just like I vote against Ruckelshaus on Weyerhaeuser's board, because I have no respect for Ruckelshaus whatsoever because of what he did when he was the EPA administrator.

HKS: Let's talk about that too. This is all at the same time. During the early '70s, he was EPA administer.

WDH: He was for a while.

HKS: Then there was this lawsuit in Texas; Sierra Club versus the Natural Resources Defense Council. I can't remember the name of it, but it looked like for a few months that it might spread, this Monongahela decision.

WDH: Oh, they were trying. Sure.

HKS: But that didn't work.

133 WDH: No, and there was a case in Alaska. There was a United States district court judge whose name was Von der Heydt. It looked like he was going to preclude any clearcutting on the Tongass and Chugach national forests. I've kind of forgotten what really happened to that, but somebody wanted to combine that suit with the one that had been brought on the Monongahela. We articulated against that publicly at the time, because we were scared that the next thing would be the Ninth Circuit, and if it hit the Ninth Circuit, it would hit us very badly. The Forest Service was really scared of that, although I give John McGuire credit for getting Butz, getting us together to help him make the case so the president wouldn't sign that executive order, and the president didn't. I wrote Nixon a letter after that. I can't disclose it to you now, but someday it will be disclosed when I'm dead, the letter I got back from the president on that. I got a "Dear Bill letter" on White House Stationary signed "Dick" about this subject that is a very, very interesting letter.

HKS: It's interesting to hear that, because we're developing a project to interview the four former presidents on conservation issues during their administration and how the intelligence floated in and out of the White House.

WDH: This clearcutting thing and this executive order, that's a great one for Nixon.

HKS: Did you have a sense that Nixon at the time had an interest in forest issues?

WDH: He was more knowledgeable about them than most presidents have been, because he had been close to some of them. He had been a member of the Senate, and the House before.

HKS: He was thinking about China and lots of major issues.

WDH: Of course.

HKS: You felt he had an understanding that there was a National Forest System.

WDH: I think he was on the side of righteousness there. Yes, I do. I think they were trying to use him there that time. I don't think Train knew that much about it. I think Train was being used probably by his staff too.

HKS: Did you ever work with Haldeman?

WDH: No.

HKS: Haldeman was his chief adviser in the White House.

WDH: The only one I ever worked with was Colson, who now is a born again Christian.

HKS: Right. Okay, at some point it seemed clear that it wasn't going to spread. The Monongahela was going to stay back in the east here. There was this strategy, the judge

134 says, "If you don't like the law, change the law. Don't complain about the decision." So that's in fact what happened.

WDH: What led to the National Forest Management Act.

HKS: You must have been involved.

WDH: I was a witness there, too. Sure. You bet.

HKS: How about Hubert Humphrey? You must have been involved with him at that time.

WDH: I was testifying before the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry on that, and he was called out of the room. He was the chairman of the subcommittee, and he was called out of the room on the phone. He had Senator Helms of North Carolina, who was a freshman then, take the chair, and Helms and I were just concluding my testimony. The Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry was an interesting committee to testify before, because the room was small, there was only room for twenty-five or thirty people in an audience sitting over on that side [gestures], you're sitting at a big oval table, the chairman sits up here, the stenotypist here, you sit right alongside the chairman at the table. This was in the old Senate office building, you know, the original building. In the new Senate office building, they're sitting up on a dais, you know, like an emperor on a throne. You're down below looking up at him. It was different there. It was much more informal, and I think it was a hell of a lot better way to legislate that it is in the new system.

When Humphrey came back he said, "Off the record," so the stenotypist quit, and he looked over at me and laughed and said, "Well, Bill, it's nice to be on the same side for a change, isn't it?" [laughs] He was a charming guy, you know. He'd charm you right out of your shoes.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: I met him first when we were seat mates on an airplane from Chicago to Washington. I recognized him of course from his pictures. I'd never met him before. I introduced myself, and after I had introduced myself and told him where I was from, the next thing I said was, "Well, senator, it's been nice to make your acquaintance," because he talked my arm off the whole way to Washington. [both laugh] I'm quite a talker myself, so it was quite an experience, but I liked him. I liked him personally, although I didn't agree with him on a lot of things philosophically.

Resources Planning Act

HKS: In between we have RPA. Were you involved in that?

WDH: Oh, sure. You bet. I was a significant witness in that.

135 HKS: What were the issues? What were the debates? What were the pros and cons on RPA when it was going through?

WDH: The whole purpose of RPA was to set up a machinery whereby we could get a projection of what the needs were, so that we could start getting some decent appropriation facilities in place to carry out the program that the Forest Service needed to do. For years they'd had the authorization for all these things, but every year they had got a budget for the Appropriations committee for another fiscal year, and they had to ding them for this and ding them for that. There's no assurance that you're going to continue something you get started, like the transportation system. If we hadn't worked on that as long as we did, it never would have been continued. It would have been stop and go, stop and go, and you can't do it that way. If you are really going to convert a bunch of unmanaged lands to a managed property, you've got to have a progression of steps and you've got to continue to do it. That is what RPA was set up to do. A Resources Planning Act, that's what it's for. It looked as though it was going to give us the best vehicle that we'd ever had to really put the national forests under management.

HKS: So who was opposed to it?

WDH: Well, the environmentalists were opposed to it, a lot of them. They didn't like it, because they thought that it was going to get the Forest Service in a position where it would practice forestry, which a lot of them really don't want them to do. We had some strange hearings on that. One of the congressmen involved was a California congressman Democrat by the name of Krebs, who was born in Berlin by the way and had almost as heavy a German accent as Kissinger. He and I got into it. I have a recording of this. I had a tape recorder, and I recorded my testimony before him. The oral testimony, you don't have that like your prepared stuff, so if you want to preserve any of the interesting stuff you have to record it. So I had a little tape recorder, and I was taking it down. I mentioned something about General Motors, and he grabbed a hold of me and says, "You're not like that man Wilson are you that said 'What's good for General Motors is good for the U.S.A.'?" "No," I said, "I didn't say that, Mr. Krebs." I said, "What's good for forestry is good for the U.S.A." And the audience all laughed like hell. The tapes got the laughter in there. It's funny. But then we beat him. This was on Jennings Randolph's bill. This was Randolph's bill on the clearcutting issue. This is not RPA.

HKS: Okay.

WDH: Two nights later I was on the plane going from Washington to Denver, and he was on it too, so I saw him. "Well," he says, "I guess you licked us." "Well," I says, "I don't feel jubilant about that. You probably were wrong on that, and your peers have decided that you were wrong, and that's what happened. I'm not gloating over you. It's nice to win once in a while, but when the side of righteousness wins in anything, all of us should be happy including you." [chuckles] I asked him where he was born. He told me he was born in Berlin. He said, "You been to Berlin?" I said, "No, I've never been to Berlin." He said, "Well, you ought to go sometime." I said, "I will one day."

HKS: RPA has been shot at by just about everybody.

136

WDH: Oh, yeah.

HKS: What's your sense of it?

WDH: They're not following it. That's the problem. It's a good framework for doing a hell of a job, but they've gone off on a bunch of side roads, and they've strayed away from the main highway. They've pissed away the main chance. I think it's a good law. I think that it set the framework for really planning and planning to get the means and the funds to continue the kind of job of forestry that needs to be done in the national forests, which is what the law requires under the Act of June 4, 1897, and now we're not paying any attention to it.

One very significant thing in all this legislation that I've been a participant with in the last thirty-five years is this, that the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, the Wilderness Act, the National Forest Management Act, the Resources Planning Act, none of them have repealed in any way the purposes for which the national forests were established under the Act of June 4, 1897--water and timber. Because they've all got a saving clause in them that nothing in this act is in derogation of the purposes of which the national forests were established under the Act of June 4, 1897. The Wilderness Act has got that in it, and that's something that the bureaucrats and the Congress have completely overlooked.

HKS: I thought the National Forest Management Act repealed the 1897 Act.

WDH: Does not. Does not. No sir.

HKS: Okay.

WDH: It sets up an obstacle in part, in talking about nondeclining even flow, but it doesn't repeal it. It doesn't repeal it. All of these acts are supplementary to but not in derogation of. That's the language that's used in some of them. I tried to get it in the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act. We had an argument in the NFPA on that, and I lost it. Weyerhaeuser's lawyers were writing the language "but not in derogation of." I said, "You can talk a hell of a lot plainer than that. 'Nothing in this act shall be in conflict with the purposes for which the national forests were established under the Act of June 4, 1897.'" I wanted to write it something like that. Instead they got the word "derogation." I said, "'Derogation' is a six-bit word. The average person doesn't know what the hell the word 'derogation' means." But lawyers, you know how they are.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: I lost that argument.

National Forest Management Act

137 HKS: So the National Forest Management Act comes along as an amendment officially to RPA.

WDH: Yeah.

HKS: It seems kind of cumbersome.

WDH: It is cumbersome. I don't know who really screwed that up, but it's not a very clearly written act. It's the kind of an act that gives people who don't want forestry practiced in the national forests all kinds of opportunities to prevent it through appeals and litigation. When you combine that with NEPA, with that statement in NEPA that "anything that affects the quality of the human environment," which could be interpreted broadly as anything that you do, you've set up a maze through which no psychologist could run a rat and get him out of the rat house onto the side of the street where he ought to be.

HKS: When the National Forest Management Act had the language on biological diversity, did any flags go up? Did anyone forecast that that was going to be an issue a decade or more later?

WDH: I don't think so. Not to my knowledge.

HKS: It seemed like a fair statement when you looked at in 1976.

WDH: Oh, sure. Biodiversity has got a ring to it like Christianity, the Golden Rule, mother, home, Fourth of July, apple pie. It's all good stuff. Who's going to be against it? But if you use it to prevent other good stuff, then it becomes an evil, and that's what it's become. These kids like Franklin for example, a member of the faculty of our college [laughs].

HKS: I know Jerry. We worked in the Forest Service at the same time.

WDH: Of course you do. You know, these guys hide behind biodiversity when they don't know what the hell it's all about.

HKS: At the same time the Forest Management Act was going through, FLPMA was going through for the BLM.

WDH: I testified on that too.

HKS: That wasn't controversial, was it?

WDH: No. No. As a matter of fact, we supported most of it, made some suggestions for modifying it. Congressman Melcher of Montana before he was in the Senate was the chairman of the subcommittee of the Interior Committee that held the hearing. They had a field hearing at Medford where I testified, and I later testified at the hearing of the full Committee in Washington, D.C., on it. They adopted some of the amendments that we suggested to modify it a little bit. We had had a hell of a problem over a long period of

138 years with the Bureau of Land Management on rights of way. When you've got intermingled land in a checkerboard pattern you can't go but a mile on your own land. You've got to go with your hat in hand to the secretary of the interior and ask for a right of way. And in return, for the right to cross the government's land to reach your own, he wants you to give him an elephant for a peanut. We took them on on that. We lost the thing in the regulations that they promulgated way back in 1950, and we were able to get some little sense on the FLPMA on that to make it a little bit more judicious from the standpoint of equity between the parties.

The federal government in the case of being a land owner, Pete, has got to recognize that it is a proprietor just like the private land owner. In a negotiation between the two, between the private land owner and the public land owner, there's a tendency for the public land owner to take the Fedora of the proprietor off and throw it away and put the crown of the sovereign on his head and say, "I'm the king. You've got to do it my way." We have always tried to make the case in the exchange of rights of way and all that, one that it ought to be equitable to both parties on a value for value basis. If it's worth this much to you, you ought to pay for it. If it's worth this much to us, we ought to pay for it. But what they wanted, they wanted a free ride over the road system that we would build on rights of way granted by them across their lands to reach our own. They wanted a free ride for everybody else to use those roads for their timber. The theory was that you can't give a guy a right to tie up, get a monopoly in government timber, because he owns the right of way or he's got the easement for the right of way. So that you or I or anybody else should have the right to bid on the timber, and of course they do.

HKS: You worked extensively with the Forest Service and the BLM in different departments, different legislation. How about the people on the ground, the same kind of foresters, same kind of aspirations?

WDH: Oh, sure. It's been a complex thing in that respect. There's always been a tendency for some administration to come along and say, "We need to combine all he forestry functions of the government into one agency." The proposals, beginning way back in President Hoover's time, was to have a Department of Conservation or a Department of Natural Resources, something like that and take the Forest Service out of the Department of Agriculture. It would be a newly named Department of the Interior really. There was a tendency during the regulation issue for people in the industry to want to support something like that, because they were so unhappy with the Forest Service wanting to get regulation of the private lands all the time. But in later years, when Carter was president for example and Andrus who is now the governor of Idaho was the secretary of the interior, we had a big meeting with him down in Florida, the NFPA annual meeting, about that thing, because he was proposing it. We took him on on it, and we prevented it. We didn't want it. I think one of the reasons why the industry doesn't support it anymore is the fact that I think that people think that when buying government timber that even having the duplication of two agencies managing lands like the O&C land for example, adjacent to the national forests in the same state, a little competition probably is a good thing. I don't know. You can't make the case for it on the basis of efficiency theoretically, but in a practical way maybe you can. I don't know.

139 Timber Sale Bailouts

HKS: This started in the late '70s with high inflation and so-called bailouts of timber sales. You must have been involved in that, and you had a very diverse constituency.

WDH: Not very much. Because the bailout of the timber sale really didn't occur until after I was retired.

HKS: Okay.

WDH: That was in the '80s really. I mean it was beginning to appear on the horizon all right, but I was never involved in that in any way. I never had anything to do with that, because no one asked us to help on any of those things. The only time that anybody ever asked us to bail them out or help bail them out on a timber sale--there was a company Anacortes Veneer, which was a co-op up in Anacortes, Washington. A fellow by the name of Fred Johnson was the manager of it. They weren't members of our association. They belonged to the Loggers Association, but after we separated from the West Coast, they never joined, never could sell him membership. He bought a timber sale up east of Skykomish. Tonga Ridge was the name of the sale. About seventy million feet of timber on the Snoqualmie National Forest, and he bid a terrible price for it. He bid sixty dollars a thousand for the timber.

It must have been about 1952 or '3. I'll never forget it, because their logging manager was a fellow that I had known for years, Sam Stendal by name, that had been the logging manager of the Cascade Timber Company which had a logging operation in the Cedar River watershed out of Selleck, Washington. I had known him when I worked up there in the watershed, and when I worked in the Forest Service at North Bend I knew Sam Stendal. When he came to Portland to do business with the Forest Service on timber sales they had, he always came to see me. So he was an old country Swede and had a heavy accent. So Sam came in one day. [affecting an accent] "Hey, Bill," he says, "can I use yer telephone?" I said, "Sure, Sam, go ahead." So he called up, "Hey, Yohnson," he says. "This is Sam. Did ya get the timber? [pause] You did. Ya. How much did you pay for it? [pause] Sixty dollars. God, man, are you crazy?" [both laugh] He was talking to the manager of the company. His face, I thought he was going to die of an apoplectic stroke right there. His face got red. When he hung up the phone he said, "That god damn Yohnson paid sixty dollars for that fir up on Tonga Ridge. It's as defective as hell. I went all through it. Defective." Well, Johnson talked to Congressman Jackson--Jackson was still a Representative in the second district--he talked Jackson, whose constituent he was at Anacortes, into introducing a private bill for god's sake to relieve them of that timber sale. Then Johnson came to see me to see if the association would support him. So I got a copy of the bill from Jackson's office and I reproduced it and sent it out to our board, and said, "This guy wants us to do this. What do you think?" Boy did my phone ring. [laughs] "Let the son of a bitch eat it. Let the son of a bitch eat it."

HKS: I worked on North Bend district in 1957, just out of forestry school, and they were still talking about the Tonga Ridge sale.

140 WDH: At the annual meeting of the Society of American Foresters in San Francisco in 1991, I went to a meeting one day on which there were five or six hundred people in the audience. I've forgotten whether it was the Division of Economics and Policy or whatever it was, but something like that. They had a program for which they had a number of speakers. A woman from the Sierra Club was to be one of them, but she was just about due to give birth to a baby and her doctor advised her that she'd better not.

Whoever was arranging the meeting ran into Rupert Cutler in the elevator and talked him into substituting. Other people who were in the program were John McMahon, who was a vice-president of Weyerhaeuser in charge of their woodlands operations; and a fellow who was the regional forester in Portland, who is now deputy chief of the Forest Service in charge of international forestry, Jeff Sirmon. He was on the program, and then Cutler and some other fellow. I've forgotten who the fourth fellow was. They all talked about how forestry's gone to hell in a hand basket and how in the tropics the deforestation is ruining the country and how no one thinks that we're doing the right thing. It was a very discouraging doomsday type of presentation. I was sitting down in the front row, and I was still having trouble getting up out of chairs and had a cane with me. I got up, struggled up with my cane. After three or four other people had made some comments, I walked back to the center section and the fellow who had been at the microphone before me was short, so I had to put my cane down and raise the microphone up to my height.

The moderator, whom I think was a prof from Syracuse, said, "Would you like to ask a question, sir?" I said, "I could, but if I did it would be rhetorical. I really came up here to make a little speech." I said, "I'm rather disappointed in the fact that all the speakers seemed so discouraged about the future of forestry in this country and the world for that matter, because everybody seems to think that nothing is working. I'm getting a little bit tired of us talking that way to ourselves, because we're certainly not going to encourage other people to tell us that we're doing anything that's worthwhile if we don't believe it ourselves. I'd just like to tell you that I think that the job that the forestry profession has done in the United States in my time has been rather phenomenal. Take the Clarke- McNary Act, when that was passed in 1924 we had only planted in the whole history of the United States a million six hundred thousand acres of trees. Now we plant two million acres every year. Why? Because we took care of the fire problem. We relegated it to the solved column in most cases, and were then able to encourage people as well as governments to invest money in the growing of trees. We ought to let the people know about it. We're not telling people that story anymore. It's occurring. We're continuing to do it. I'd just like to tell you that I've spent many years of my life working with a man by the name of W. B. Greeley, who had more to do with getting the Clarke-McNary Act passed than any other man. He'd be disappointed in the way you're reacting to some of this stuff."

I went on for a few minutes like that, and then I talked to them about five or six minutes, and then I got mad. I said, "There is one other thing that I would like to say. I'm god damned sick and tired of the fraud that the United States government has perpetrated upon the people of the Pacific Northwest over an obscure, nocturnal owl that hardly anyone ever sees, because most people who work in the woods don't work there at night, they work in the daytime and the owl isn't abroad then unless you're out

141 there calling him and specifically looking for him. I'd like to see somebody have guts enough to take on this problem and do something about it." And geez, I got one hell of an applause. In the excitement of the applause, I walked back to my seat, flopped down in this chair--there were no arms on the chair, these were meeting type chairs--and I'd forgotten my cane. I struggled up out of the chair again, walked up to get my cane. The audience, of course everybody, was watching me. [laughs] I reached down, picked up the cane, and I brandished it at the crowd and I said, "Well, ladies and gentleman, it just goes to show you that when you've got something that needs to get off your chest and you get it off, it's god damn good therapy." [both laugh] They howled.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: I got sixty-five letters in the mail in the month from people who had been at that meeting. Do you know Dick Jordan?

HKS: Yes.

WDH: He and I do some work together. He and I are very good friends. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey. New Jersey along with Pennsylvania and Maryland are in the Appalachian section. He sent me their newsletter, and the guys said a "respected old- timer," and he cited in capsule what I just told you here. But I don't like to get up and do that at our meetings, but my god, when these guys get up and do that kind of stuff, someone's got to do it. We've got to straighten these guys out and make them understand that we're a profession that has a tremendous record of accomplishment behind it in our lifetime. Also, one last thing on this subject. I said, "You know, it's our generation that brought it to pass, but it was the previous generation, men like Colonel Greeley, that set the stage for us and gave us the tools in order to get this. I just tell you one thing about my profs and where I went to school, we weren't practicing forestry in the United States when I went to forestry school. Very little. Very, very sparsely done in very few places. But I remember that one of the best things that I got out of my education was that every one of our profs, each of them in a different way because their personalities were different, every one of them said 'If and when forestry becomes feasible in this country, go out there and give it everything you've got and do it, because the country needs it.' We ought to have that attitude today." We haven't got it anymore. The kids aren't getting that out of school today. I got that out of the University of Washington. As poor as Pappy Pearce was as a prof, he did enthuse us for wanting to go out and do it, and I respect him greatly for that.

Tropical Deforestation

HKS: To take off from what you just talked about, tropical deforestation. Harry Morgan of Weyerhaeuser was on our board, and he was telling me that he had reason to fly over Brazil many times. He said he never saw an opening when he looked out the plane window.

WDH: Lots of timber there. [chuckles]

142 HKS: So what is the issue in tropical deforestation? What's your sense of this? It's a major issue these days, and it doesn't seem to go away.

WDH: It's become that just like a lot of other environmental things have, because these fellows can raise money with it. They scare the hell out of people with it, and say that biodiversity, all the pharmaceuticals that are going to come out of it. Hell, the worst guy on that in the whole country is Russell Train and his World Wildlife Fund. They're not interested in wildlife. They're just interested in raising money. And I didn't send you a copy of the paper that I wrote on that subject, did I? I wrote a paper on it at a meeting in Portland recently, several years ago.

HKS: Here we are, Tropical Forests are Different.

WDH: That's it. I cited in here at the beginning of this my own experience during the war, when I was the engineer for lumbering in the Solomon Islands, and going up to Guam to cruise the timber up there and take a mill up there. The during the Korean War when I went and looked at the timber at the Subic Bay naval reservation as a consultant to the navy. And my work in Costa Rica. I had a fair amount of tropical experience, and more recently in 1986, I went to Belize and looked at nine thousand acres of timber down there for the Cooperative Housing Foundation. As a result of it I've got some feelings on this stuff. Of course I've traveled widely throughout the tropics. I mean I've been in Southeast Asia. I've been in Borneo. I've been in Java. I've been in Argentina. I've been in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, throughout all the countries in Central America. I've been throughout all the islands that are forested in the Antilles throughout from Trinidad clear to Cuba, including Cuba. As well as having been throughout all of North America and all of western Europe. I've never been to Africa except to go to Tangier and Morocco on a one day trip from Spain. But I had a chance to see a lot of it.

It's overexaggerated what these fellows are saying. The biggest problem in the tropics is the nomadic agriculture that consists of going into government-owned land where the squatters will fall the timber, burn it, plant a crop, harvest two crops maybe or three, move next door and repeat the process. If they didn't do that, there would be millions of people in the tropical parts of the world that would starve to death. There's no government that's strong enough in any of those countries to stop it. They can have laws. You know, their laws say that it is against the law to cut and trespass on the government forest, but what politician is going to consign a significant part of their population to starvation? Nobody. Nobody.

HKS: In Ethiopia they've been doing it?

WDH: Well, yes.

HKS: And Somalia.

WDH: But nobody would condone that here. But let me tell you about Indonesia. I worked for the Indonesians on a project here a couple of years ago. I had the chief forester of Indonesia and about four others including a couple of lumbermen from there, and I took them up to Weyerhaeuser's St. Helens tree farm. And these boys were all

143 trained in Dutch schools. They all went to the University of Wageningen or whatever it's called in Holland, where there's a forest school as the kids from the Dutch East Indies did for years before Indonesia was independent. They still go there. They've got strong ties with Holland yet educationally and economically, not politically anymore of course. But these fellows are very articulate in English, and I took them up for a whole day on this trip. They're all fascinated of course, coming from the tropics, with annual rings in trees, because their trees don't have annual rings except at high elevation. They love to get down and count the rings on the stump and see how old the tree was. Weyerhaeuser's operating on a forty-five year rotation at St. Helen's now. We were in a second-growth stand that was about forty-five years of age when it was cut, so the chief forester of Indonesia who's all of five foot three, a Javanese, gets down on his hands and knees to kneel at a low stump and he's got his pencil out and he's counting these rings. I'm on the other side doing the same thing on the same stump. He looks away to see how far the Weyerhaeuser forester that's taking us around, our host for the day, to make sure he's out of earshot. He looks over at me and he says, "Too young." [laughs] Too young.

But here's what I learned from him. This paper was written before I'd had that experience with him. They are reforesting five hundred thousand hectares a year in Indonesia. It's a huge project in one country.

HKS: What I see on the various maps that are produced is that most of the deforestation has taken place in Indonesia. It's just getting started in Latin America.

WDH: There's been a lot of it there because a hell of a lot of it was for agriculture.

HKS: Yes, that's true.

WDH: I went to the World Forestry Congress that was held in Jakarta. By that time the Forest Service had allowed me to be an official delegate. I was an official delegate that time, as I was to the one in Buenos Aries. I was twice. Java is three times the size of Vancouver Island, and there's a hundred million people that live on it. A hundred million people, and it's a very productive island. Its productive for forest, productive for food. City of Jakarta maybe five, six, eight million people. It's a huge city, and there's farms all through it, all through the residential areas, people out there growing food like mad.

When we were there, Weyerhaeuser invited us to visit their logging operation over on Borneo, on the east side of Borneo, Balikpapan. Of course everybody wanted to go to Borneo the first time in his life. When I was a kid, you saw at the carnivals and side shows, the Wild Man from Borneo, a guy with a bone in his nose and kinky hair and all that stuff. So from the time you're a little boy you always wanted to go to Borneo and see the wild man. The Wild Man from Borneo today is a guy riding on a Yamaha motorcycle from the Mobil oil refinery in Balikpapan. He wears gold chains around his neck. [laughs]

We went over there to visit the logging operation that Weyerhaeuser had there then. They don't have it anymore. They're out of there now. They were in partners with the

144 government, and they were building a sawmill. They had a guy from Coos Bay that was building a sawmill there. Weyerhaeuser pulled out because the Indonesian government would not allow them to export logs anymore. They have to manufacture them there, so there's been a building up of a huge hardwood plywood industry in Indonesia, in Borneo particularly, because Borneo is the fourth largest island in the world. It's got a four million population. The reason there are only four million when right adjacent in Java there are a hundred million, you can't grow any food there. Weyerhaeuser spent a fortune with a bunch of agricultural scientists from the University of California Ag School at Davis to go over there to try to grow food for their logging camps, and they couldn't grow it. They could grow trees but they couldn't grow food. They could grow tapioca, that's manioc. That's the only thing they can grow. But you can eat just so much fish-eye pudding and after that you've got to have something else. [both laugh] Read this thing some day [thumps report] and you'll find what I really think about the tropics. I think there's a bunch of misinformation and insidious propaganda by people that are out there raising money who want to save the tropical forests to prevent the ozone from going haywire and all that stuff.

HKS: In terms of what's going on in the Triangle area at the universities, in the schools of forestry and so forth, it's the big topic: tropical deforestation, third world forest, World Bank grants, AID grants.

WDH: Oh, I'm sure it is. I'm sure it is.

HKS: If you look at the faculty, the best and the brightest, and the students the best and the brightest, they're not dealing with North America.

WDH: No.

HKS: They're dealing with other areas.

WDH: Yeah.

HKS: I'm not sure what these people are going to do when they get their graduate degrees in tropical forestry. I'm not sure who they're going to work for.

WDH: There's no question but what people need to learn how to manage some of those forests, because I'm sure some of them aren't very well managed. But I tell you this, the biggest problem in the whole doggone thing is sociological. That's what it is. It isn't a forestry problem, because with the kind of distribution of species that you have in tropical forests, it lends itself to species selection. What they do, they go in there and high-grade the high value species and leave the lower value species behind. So you get a downgrading of the forest, because if you leave nothing for seed source except the inferior species, there's a lesser value--I shouldn't say "inferior," that's a bad term--the less-valuable species, they're going to reforest the area.

I saw that when I looked at the Subic Bay Naval Reservation during the Korean War for the Navy. One of my jobs was to recommend to them what they should do to practice forestry. They had done a little. They'd been fooling around with it. They had a little

145 nursery there, and they were growing species like and to replace the Dipterocarps. But, hell, the plantations of teak were fine, but everything else the native species had taken over because the Dipterocarps are prolific seeders, and if you don't burn the area up, they're going to reseed like mad. By the way the Dipterocarps have got huge seeds on them. Some of them are half as big as a man's head, and when the seeds are falling, it's a hazard to be out in those woods without a hardhat. [both laugh]

HKS: I can see that. Okay, I've gone through my list on the '70s except for one that you brought up as an aside. I have here the last one, Nixon to Ford to Carter to Reagan. Now, let's talk about Nixon and Ruckelshaus. Did you want to make some comment about Ruckelshaus? Because he's Mr. Clean during the Reagan administration.

WDH: I know. At the annual meeting of the Society of American Foresters which was held at Cleveland, Ohio, and I don't remember the date of it now but it's when Ruckelshaus was the administrator of the EPA. He was on the program there. I got up and said, "Mr. Ruckelshaus, my name is Hagenstein, initials the same as yours W. D. It looks to me like you people are trying to put restrictions on what agencies like the Forest Service can do with respect to the sale of timber. I'd like to ask you to address that and tell us what you think the role of the EPA is." He's a lawyer by profession and he gave us a big, long legal discussion and he never answered my question at all. So I got kind of disgusted with him. The first thing I know Weyerhaeuser hired him as a vice-president. Everybody in our industry thought that was an attempt by Weyerhaeuser to hire a guy from the EPA so as to make their road easier in dealing with the government on what they considered to be problems in connection with NEPA on private land, the water thing mainly.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: I don't know what he did for him, because I wasn't that close to him. Then Weyerhaeuser quit our association in 1978. They resigned after having been one of the companies that started it. I don't know why. They never told me why. They just said that looking to the future that they thought that the way things were going, they needed to make their own arrangements, so they did. By the way, they belonged to the successor of IFA. I think maybe they were mad at me. I don't know. Because I used to take them on when they were wrong, stood up to them. I was always courteous to them, but I treated every association member the same whether you were Weyerhaeuser that paid more dues that anybody else or the guy who paid minimum dues of twenty-five dollars a month. They got the same treatment from us. Of course I differed with Weyerhaeuser on the log export issue in that I thought we needed to be more temperate than we were. I think we became excessive in the log export field. We haven't gotten to the log export thing yet, but-.

Log Exports

HKS: We can talk about it right now.

146 WDH: All right. When the log export issue became pretty hot in 1968, well first in late 1967, the NFPA got a bunch of us together to go and visit with the government. We talked to the White House and we talked to the secretaries of agriculture and interior, talked to the secretary of commerce, because the Export Control Act under his jurisdiction was involved, and to the trade representatives. Then we got the industry together, those that were in favor of log exports and those that were against it. We got them together and got kind of a middle ground to where we agreed that it would be desirable to recommend to the government that there would be a limitation put on the export of logs from federal timber. One of the ways we were able to convince the log exporters to be in favor of that is that there was a precedent set in the 1926 law that covered the national forests in Alaska that required primary processing. The logs were harvested from the up there. All the big guns from Weyerhaeuser were involved in it: Bernie Orell and two or three others, I guess Charlie Bingham. And we had the leaders of the other trade associations, the Plywood Association, Western Wood Products, and we had the WFIA, McCracken's outfit. We had Arnold Ewing of Northwest Timber Association. I don't know whether George Craig of Western Timber Association was there. Log exports were not a big issue in California because it wasn't the problem that it was in Oregon and Washington.

As a result of the representations that we had there, the representation that we made to the government there, this stimulated Senator Morse into deciding to hold some hearings. Morse had given up all his seniority as a Republican when he was an Independent for a couple years and sat out between the aisles on the Senate floor. He had a chair that he brought out. He didn't sit with the Democrats or Republicans. He sat out in the middle aisle between them when he was an Independent. When he had to run for re-election, he knew that he would never get re-elected as an Independent, so he let the Democrats baptize him and he ran for election fir his third term as a Democrat. Then when he was elected as a Democrat, he moved to the Democratic side of the aisle.

In 1968 he had acquired enough seniority as a Democrat--the Democrats controlled the Senate--to be named the chairman of a subcommittee of the Small Business Committee. Small business was one he was always interested in because he was the principal author of the small business set-aide arrangement for setting aside government timber sales for exclusive bidding by small business. He decided early in January of 1968 to call hearings on log exports. Nineteen sixty-eight was an important year for him, because it was the year that his term would expire and he'd be up for re-election. He'd be running for his fifth term to the Senate, and he decided the log export issue was sexy enough that if he were able to do something constructive with it that he might have a fair chance of being re-elected. He called me on the phone and said, "We're going to hold some hearings on this subject," and he set the date. I believe it was sixteenth of January. He called me about oh, two or three days after New Year's and said, "I want you to be the initial and principal witness." He knew from some of the public statements that I had made that I was a moderate on the subject, that I wasn't opposed to log exports, but I thought that they'd become excessive and I thought they were detrimental to the economy of the Northwest. He knew also that five years prior to that the IFA had begun to collect log sales statistics.

147 The Pacific Northwest Loggers Association had done that for years on log sales in the open log markets in Puget Sound and Columbia River and Grays and Willapa harbors. They went out of business in 1963, and the reason they went out was because their board and our board agreed that IFA would continue to compile log transaction statistics, because they were useful to people. This was a very complicated thing where by contract the individual companies that were engaged in either in buying or selling logs would furnish transaction data to the association. If they signed the statistical service contract, they would furnish us the invoices of their transactions, all of them, every single one. We would use our best efforts to compile in each of these districts-- Puget Sound, Columbia River, and Grays and Willapa harbors, and later we extended this to the Willamette Valley and the Oregon coast, which the Loggers Association hadn't done before.

We would compile these data showing the number of logs by species by three different markets: water sales, export sales, and inland sales--inland where the logs were not dumped in towable waters but dry decked someplace where they're sold to a mill. They were segregated by species, by log grades, and we did certain statistical calculations to show the percentages of the grade that was in the species and all that sort of thing. Very useful to people who were buying and selling logs. You get an idea of what the trend of the market is. We'd publish these on a quarterly basis, and then each year we'd make an annual recapitulation. These data were useful not only to the buyers and sellers of logs, but also useful to people for establishing the value of timber for their Internal Revenue forms concerning capital gains on timber under the Bailey Amendment.

We did all this manually for a long time. Finally we got to where we put it on some kind of business machine, not a computer but something like that, a bookkeeping machine that was able to compile the stuff and punch cards and stuff like that. It cost us about fifteen or twenty thousand dollars a year to do all this, and the people paid for it. If you participated in it, you'd pay on the basis of what the total volume of your transactions were. It would be proportionate. If Weyerhaeuser had 16 percent, well they'd pay 16 percent of the cost and so on. We got about twenty-five companies to participate in this, and that meant a lot more because they not only sold logs but they bought logs, and we got the transactions from all these guys they bought logs from. Because all these companies in a region like ours buy and sell logs, because if they've got plants that they need certain grades and species for, and in their own logging operation they've got some they don't need, so they sell those or trade them to somebody else. So it was a complex thing, but we did a good job with it.

Immediately, of course, it showed us the quantities and the values, what they were getting in dollars for the exports. Of course it showed very clearly that the export logs were bringing in fabulously higher prices than the domestic logs, with which data you could make the case that if you restricted the export of logs or slowed it down, it would have an effect upon the market price. So Morse knew that we were sampling these statistics, and he knew damn well that I could make the case for it. Of course Weyerhaeuser and all the big log exporters all participated in these hearings, too, including the state of Washington. Bert Cole, the land commissioner of the state of Washington testified. He didn't want any restrictions. He said, "We've got a requirement under the state constitution to get the highest price we can get for state timber for the

148 beneficiaries which are the capitol grant, the school grant, the university grant, and so on." I was the principal witness, the initial witness, in these hearings. I was on the stand for many hours, and then called back from time to time because Morse would ask me about specific things. The hearing record of this initial hearing is three volumes. It's a textbook on how to conduct a hearing. In all the experience I had in hearings, I never saw a guy really do a better job at conducting a hearing to help people from the chair, help witnesses make the case as Morse did. It was a great exhibition of a man who had a tremendous amount of ability who for twenty-three years had pissed it away in the Senate. If he'd conducted himself all the way like that, he'd have been in the Senate until he died, but he didn't. This was his twenty-fourth year in the Senate when he finally came to and became a useful constructive member. It was a great experience. I suppose I probably got in trouble with some of our exporters among our members. I don't know. Weyerhaeuser was the only one that ever quit us because of it, if that's why they quit, and I don't really know that to be a fact. But I made the case. I wasn't giving anybody hell or anything like that.

Right after those hearings in January, the United States sent a trade mission to Japan in February of 1968 to enter into some kind of a negotiation with the Japanese government and the Japanese forest industry. It was an official trade mission headed by a deputy secretary of state. And the major associations like the American Plywood Association, NFPA, Western Wood Products Association, and ourselves and Western Forest Industries Association, all had a couple delegates. Each association was allowed to have a couple of delegates. I was appointed to the State Department as a government adviser in this thing. Then we went to Japan for two weeks in which we had negotiations with the Japanese industry, and we had negotiations with the Japanese government in the Foreign Ministry, United Nations type of thing with earphones and simultaneous translations, Japanese and English and back and forth, in which we all made a presentation where you bowed to the chairman and said, "Dozo, please. Arigato, thank you." I was the only American who made a little speech in Japanese. I've studied enough of it to do it. Before I made my presentation, a Japanese delegate said, [affecting an accent] "I am a Samurai. I like to fight. We fight big war. Our hills are bare. We rike your rogs, but we don't rike your rumble." That's the way he said it. I was next, so when I got permission I said, "We fight big war. Same war. Our hills are bare. We like to sell logs to Japan, but Japan should consider, to safeguard its privilege of buying logs, starting to buy lumber and plywood and other forest products, because we need employment in our country just like you need it in yours. We have the wood. You need the wood. We should work out some means to accommodate each other." Well, nothing happened. Our trade mission was a waste of time, because the Japanese had no intention whatsoever of buying lumber and plywood as long as they could get logs. The log export thing continued to escalate and go on and on.

Well, Morse held another hearing. He was committed. He held another hearing on the log export thing in July, and we participated in that. He was committed to NFPA, to hold a hearing of this subcommittee on the whole government timber management thing. He was defeated in the election by Packwood on the first Tuesday after the first Monday November of 1968. He held a hearing anyway even though he was defeated, and he was a lame duck Senator then until the end of the year. He held this last hearing. For some reason NFPA wanted to be the kingpin in this hearing. They didn't want some

149 of the regional guys to participate, and they weren't going to let me even participate in it. They were making the arrangements with Morse. So I called Morse and said, "I want to testify in this hearing." "Well," he says, "come ahead." So I did, and it was a good hearing. There are four volumes or five I guess. The Log Export plus this Timber Management thing.

HKS: Okay.

WDH: Every time that a young man has come to see me who's interested in the politics of forestry and what Congress does with it-. I had a lot of sets of these hearing records, because I circulated them to everybody in our industry that I thought ought to have them because of the valuable material in them, lots of good data in them. It's not useful now. It's just historical now, but it was valuable then. I told all these young fellows that I'd give them a set of these hearing records. "If you want to see and study a textbook of how a congressional hearing should be run, to get the information that people need to formulate desirable policy," I said, "you'll find it in here, because it was the best conducted hearing that I ever saw in my life."

The epilogue to the whole issue was that I was under all kinds of pressure afterwards. What Morse was able to do was he got the Morse Amendment passed.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: He really pulled a rabbit out of the hat. He really did. And the president signed it into law right away. There was no objection to it. Johnson was president. I was under pressure from our industry to support Morse for re-election. All kinds of guys that were on the side of no log exports or control the log exports were after Georgia-Pacific. Their man, Jack Brandis, who was their vice-president called me up. Georgia-Pacific was doing a little exporting but not a lot. Jack Brandis said, "We've got to support Morse. We've got to get Morse re-elected."

A week before the election, one morning at home, the phone rang. My wife answered it. She was up. I was taking a shower. She came in and said, "Senator Morse is on the phone and wants to talk to you. Can you take it?" I said, "Yes. Tell him to just hold on just a minute. I've got to dry myself a little bit and put a bathrobe on, because it's cold." It was early November or late October. I said, "Hello." "Bill, this is Morse." He says, "I'm just calling to see if you'll support me for re-election. You know, you could help get me a lot of votes. A lot of people think a lot of you out there." I said, "Senator, I'm sorry. Despite the fact that you've done a marvelous job in this incident, I can't do it. You know, for twenty-three years you pissed away your opportunity to be an able United States senator that you were capable of by making everybody mad at you because you had such a sharp tongue that you had no friends among your colleagues. When you introduced legislation you couldn't get it enacted, because you were just a gadfly in the Senate, the way you conducted yourself. I'm sorry. I'm very appreciative of what you did in the log export thing. I think it was a marvelous thing for the future of our region, but in good conscience I can't do it. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but I hope you understand it." He says, "I think I do. Thanks a lot anyway. I thought I'd try. Good-bye, Bill." I said, "Good-bye, Senator." But, you know, that experience with him,

150 it never interfered with our relationship after that. The next time that I saw him was when he was the moderator of a debate that Rex Resler and I had with Brock Evans and Arnold Bolle at Southwestern Oregon Community College that I told you about earlier. He told Brock Evans that if they lived to be a hundred and sixty years of age that neither one of them would know as much about the subject matter as I did. [chuckles]

HKS: How about Canada? I know that you've been following what's going on, the free trade agreements and so forth. How do you see that going? I know you're not directly involved, but you're an observer with a lot of experience.

WDH: We can't compete with the Canadians in our region, because they can use foreign shipping, for one thing. They can put lumber down in Wilmington, Delaware, or Philadelphia or Baltimore or New York or Boston for twelve to fifteen dollars a thousand less than anybody in Washington or Oregon can do it. We don't have any seaborne commerce out of our region anymore to the United States through the Panama Canal. People used to say that one of the things that made forestry feasible in the Northwest was the Panama Canal, because it gave us the chance to compete with the South by putting lumber down in the official territory, which is the northeastern quadrant of the United States, the area bounded by the Ohio River and Potomac River in the North, which was a big lumber market of course because of the heavy population. We could ship lumber through the Panama Canal to the east coast ports, and then ship it by rail back into Ohio and Indiana and compete with the Southern Pine Region. But we can't anymore. We can't compete with the Southern Pine Region in the Middle West by rail, because we don't have hold downs anymore, which were kind of a political rate fixing that was used for shipping lumber from the Northwest for years in competition with the South. And we don't have any merchant marine that carries lumber from the West Coast to the East Coast because of the Jones Act. So Canadians are unfair competition for us really.

HKS: How has the Jones Act had the staying power?

WDH: I once asked Senator Magnuson that when he was the chairman of the Commerce Committee. And he said, "Bill, the Jones Act protects our fourth arm of defense, which is the merchant marine." Well, we don't have a merchant marine anymore.

HKS: I was going to say, we don't have a merchant marine.

WDH: The money that American companies have invested in ships today, 90 percent of them are registered under foreign flags. They are registered in Panama, in Liberia, in Barbados, Bahamas. It's ridiculous. Because the Jones Act precluded us from using foreign bottoms, we had to use American bottoms. And together with the longshore unions and the marine unions afloat made it impossible for people to make money in the steamship business under the American flag, so everybody's quit it. You take a country like Norway. Norway with four million people has thirty-two million tons of shipping under its flag. The United States with two hundred and fifty million people, what have we got? Six or seven million tons?

151 HKS: How is it that we can go to a lumberyard here in Durham, and we'll see B.C. Forest two-by-fours right alongside stuff from Georgia competing on the price? How does that happen?

WDH: Because of the water transportation from B.C. around to the Gulf Coast or to Savannah or wherever they unload it here. It doesn't come by rail. It comes by water part of the way. They've got the advantage there, because they can ship in foreign bottoms and the world charter rates for shipping in foreign bottoms gives them a twelve to fifteen dollar advantage per thousand. Plus the other advantage is that all their costs are paid in Canadian dollars and they're selling their products here and getting American dollars, so you've got the differential between the currency which is another 12 to 15 percent right along.

HKS: But the local stuff comes here in one day by truck.

WDH: I know.

HKS: That's more expensive than the ship?

WDH: I'm sure it is. But the two-by-fours from B.C. may be better too than some of the ones out of second-growth southern pine. I don't know.

HKS: So it's not the competition between old-growth in B.C. versus second-growth here. It's the shipping.

WDH: It's cost. Second-growth two-by-fours are no different than two-by-fours that come out of old-growth timber--from our region at least--because the two-by-fours are cut out of the second-growth portion of the old-growth log. You know, it's cut out of the center. It isn't cut from the outside where you've got clears. You aren't going to make two-by-fours out of clears very often. If you're going to use the stuff where the knots are for two-by-fours for construction grade for example, which is satisfactory for the needs for houses that are framed on what, twenty-four-inch centers or sixteen-inch centers between studs? All houses are over-designed. My god, the factor of safety for designing wooden structures is what, five to one? Something like that.

HKS: The southern two-by-fours have bark on one corner.

WDH: Well, bark, wane. Sure. It doesn't hurt any for the strength, but it makes them look like hell. [chuckles]

HKS: That's right.

WDH: Not as merchandisable for a guy that wants to go pick them off the rack in the retail lumberyard, are they?

HKS: That's right. [both laugh] You'd spend quite a while trying to find one that's straight.

152 WDH: Of course. Loblolly pine, I know from my thesis that I made in these four counties right here that it's characteristically crooked. You've got a lot of two-by-fours that are kind of snaky from it.

Meeting the Presidents

HKS: You mentioned earlier that you had met Nixon, you'd talked to him, you'd exchanged letters with him. How about Ford or Carter or Reagan? Although Reagan would be after you retired.

WDH: I never met Reagan as president. I met Reagan when he was the governor of California at a governors' conference in Seattle once. I had this little conversation with him. I had a very interesting experience with Jerry Ford. I knew Jerry Ford when he was a congressman. You know, he was the minority leader for a while. Ruth, my first wife, was active in Republican politics and was the vice-chairman of the Republican party in our county, Multnomah County, Oregon, in the early 1960s. The chairman was Bob Packwood, who is now the junior senator for Oregon. When Ford was president, my wife was no longer active in the politics as an official, but she was active in campaigns. The Republican national committeewoman from Oregon was a very close friend of hers, and we were invited to a private breakfast with Ford at the Sheraton Hotel, or the Red Lion now, over by the Bonneville Power Administration across the river in Portland.

Mrs. Moore, the committeewoman, took Ruth and me up there to visit with the president for a minute. He talked with Ruth because he had met her before and he remembered her and talked with her about her service. She had been appointed by Nixon to be a member of the Commission on the Education of Disadvantaged Children on which she served on for three years. Ford had offered to reappoint her, and she turned it down--and he remembered that and talked to her about it--because she was of the opinion that things like that that were presidential appointments ought to be shared with people. She said you ought to have a three-year term and then let somebody else have a chance. So she didn't accept reappointment. She served three years under Nixon on it, and Ford offered to reappoint her. So I got kind of flustered while I was up there. He put his hand out, and I put my hand out to shake his hand and I said, "Bill Hagenstein." "No, no," he said, "You're Bill Hagenstein. I'm Jerry Ford." [both laugh] I was embarrassed as hell. You know, all the great guys that I had a chance to meet with my life, but I was just like a little boy. I got flustered and I called him "Bill Hagenstein." "No," he said, "you're Bill Hagenstein. I'm Jerry Ford." He's a nice guy.

HKS: I'm sure.

WDH: Then I had another experience with him about, after Ruth died in October of 1979. I was still working for six months. NFPA had their annual meeting at Rancho Mirage near Palm Springs in California. Mrs. Moore, who was a widow by that time and quite a bit older woman than I. She was probably seventy-five years old then, and I'd only be sixty-four. She was about ten years older than I was. I went to the annual meeting down there. Ford was no longer president. He was living down there, and was

153 the ex-president. He was going to be the speaker at their luncheon. So I knew of course that she knew him real well, because she was a Republican national committeewoman for about oh, sixteen, eighteen years. Of course the National Committee people not only meet the presidents, but they meet with congressmen. When Ford was the minority leader in Congress, she was well-acquainted with him. They were good personal friends. So I tried to convince Ralph Hodges that we ought to let Dorotha Moore sit up there at the head table next to Jerry Ford. They had to have their own principals up there, so she couldn't. But they did put us in a table at the luncheon right down in front. She and I sat together. And bless his heart, Ford, the kind of a guy he is, he saw her, excused himself from the people at the head table, got up and walked down around, came down there, and embraced Mrs. Moore right alongside of me, and then turned and said, "Hello, Bill. How are you?" Well, you can't help but love a guy like that.

HKS: I imagine people who are successful in politics have a way with names.

WDH: Oh, that's for sure. I have the same thing, because I was in politics, really.

HKS: Did you have a sense that Ford, because his son was in forestry, had anymore interest in forestry than another president might?

WDH: I don't really know. I never had any contacts with him about it, so I don't really know. [pause] Coming from a state like Michigan where forestry's important of course, a lot more important as a matter of fact than a lot of people who live there realize. The value of the forest products produced in Michigan is two and a half, three billion dollars a year. It's that much. That country has really come back in trees with a huge paper manufacturing industry up there, near the centers of consumption and all that. The lumber business isn't all that big, but paper is very significant up there.

HKS: I would think that oriented strandboard would be important now with all the aspen which grows there.

WDH: Probably, with all the hardwood.

Industry Moves South

HKS: Let's move on to what I've listed here as generic issues, issues that just stay with us. The industry moving South. I guess it was when GP left Portland, that was really the turning point. Is the industry moving south in that sense, or is it that the southern industry is taking on more substance, more large companies? What is the issue?

WDH: Sure.

HKS: My only insight I have is John Blackwell's warning when we moved to Durham. He said, "We're going to have trouble, because you'll be seen as abandoning the West."

WDH: Did he say that?

154 HKS: He was on our board. He voted in favor of the move, but that was his perception.

WDH: Some people accuse him of abandoning the region, now when they've gone in the world business, you know.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: They've got a project that they were involved with in Thailand, for god's sake, with CARE to help show the people in the hills of Thailand how to grow firewood. Well, I don't think that's a proper project for the World Forestry Center when we've got a hundred thousand families in Washington and Oregon who are up against it because we're not practicing forestry there. I'm disappointed in the attitude of-. I'm talking off the record here, but I'm not telling you something that's out of church. A meeting of the board of directors of the Forestry Center of which I'm no longer a member-. I'm only an honorary director now, but I was one of the founders of the center. I was one of the half a dozen or so men that founded the thing, and I helped raise six hundred thousand dollars to help build the damn thing, so I've got an interest in it. But I'm disappointed that the Forestry Center, because of the kind of guys that are running it now have abandoned the idea that they ought to be doing the job of getting the public support for forestry in the five northwest states that put up all the money to build the place. They've a got a worldwide board now, and I think they're missing the boat on what they were set up to do. They think I've missed the boat, because Merlo says that we're in a global economy and you've got to think global. Well, that's fine. But the global economy is like anything else. E pluribus unum. The success of the whole is made up of what happens to the parts. If a part as significant as the northwestern part of the United States fails to continue to practice forestry, we're not going to make anywhere near of the contribution that we're capable of doing, that our soils are capable of doing, to provide the sinews of a renewable resource that we've been doing for a century and a half now and can continue to do forever if we do the job. I think the Forestry Center ought to play a leading role in that, and I don't think it is. One of our presidents of the Forestry Center that's deceased now said to me one day, "You know, the Forestry Center is more like a travel agency now than a forestry center." That was his reaction.

HKS: So Merlo is one of the key players?

WDH: Merlo is the guy that really talked them into it. Sure. I was on the board when it happened. I put up the red flag and the warnings and all that, but I just got rolled over like I was nothing. Of course by that time I was retired, and once you're retired, no one pays attention to you anymore. They don't even write you a note anymore. Hell, I've been abandoned by so many guys that-. I understand it, so I'm not resentful about it. I wouldn't be this way toward people that I had been associated with for years as some of them have been to me, because my make up is different than theirs. That's all. I understand that. People are different.

HKS: What is the issue on the industry moving South? Certainly not the loss of a tenant in a major building in downtown Portland.

WDH: No.

155

HKS: The industry's still there. Georgia-Pacific still has operations in the West.

WDH: Yes, but they've sold a lot of their land. They sold all the lands they bought from Booth Kelly, a hundred and fifty thousand acres, beautiful lands, in Lane County, Oregon.

HKS: But they sold it to some other forest industry firm, right?

WDH: Sold it to Weyerhaeuser.

HKS: So the industry is still operating there.

WDH: Yes, and they're in the process now of selling their lands in the old Puget Sound Pulp and Timber Company, land in Whatcom, Snohomish, and Skagit counties. They've got Lincoln County and Coos County where they own the lands yet, but they don't have any--except for the pulpmill in Toledo--they hardly have any plants left. The pulpmill at Bellingham, they're still running that of course. But they've pretty well abandoned that region. I don't understand them really. I can understand why they moved South, because they have a lot more lands and properties here than they had in our region. But it looked to the public, and the people that are against the industry could make the case that you've got an abandonment going on here. Because they cut all the timber and now they run. They did cut the timber faster than I would have liked to have seen them cut it. But they had no choice in that they paid semi-retail prices for that timber when they bought it, because the time that they came into that region they didn't buy for two and three dollars a thousand like the other companies did or ten cents a thousand like Weyerhaeuser did when they bought the NP lands in 1900. They bought timber that they paid ten, twelve, fifteen, eighteen dollars a thousand for, and they had to liquidate it over a shorter period than a man that had bought it at a lot lower price would have to do, because of the carrying.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: But to their credit, they did a hell of a good job of utilization when they were here. They cleaned up a lot of the old patches and all the old blow-down areas that were left by their predecessors. They did a hell of a good job of reforestation. They've left their properties in very productive shape.

HKS: You put a different spin on it than I've ever thought about. It wasn't the industry that was concerned about GP moving. It was the environmentalists using it as an example of cut out and get out.

WDH: Sure. Exactly.

HKS: I hadn't heard that before.

WDH: Sure. exactly. They said, "Hell, they've quit. They came here and logged all the timber, and they pulled out."

156

HKS: I'd never heard it in that context, and I hadn't read your...

WDH: You hadn't read this piece, huh?

HKS: No. I looked at all the pieces to see what the subjects were, but I didn't have time to read them.

WDH: This is a pretty interesting one. There's a lot of history in this piece. As a matter of fact, that's why we printed it. You know, originally it was multilith, but we got so many requests for it that we had to print it. We printed twenty-five thousand copies of this thing. I've only got a couple dozen of them left now.

Listen to the last paragraph in this: "Finally an answer to the question, is industry moving south. My response is no. It is expanding southeast and north"--like going into Canada--"and staying here with an ever increasing intensity of forestry to grow that quarter of the forest products needs of the people of which this region is capable because of our productive soil, species and climate." Now, I wouldn't write it quite that way today, because the government is pulling out. But as far as the private sector is concerned, we are continuing to do the job. Private forestry is continuing to advance in our region.

HKS: That was my perception. I couldn't see what the ruckus was, but I hadn't thought about the "other side," what they were saying.

WDH: I've got to tell you this. It's part of the story I guess, part of my story. In 1955 when Georgia-Pacific had been in our region four years-. They bought Washington Veneer at Olympia in 1951, and that was their first purchase, a plant with no timber. Weyerhaeuser owned part of Washington Veneer by the way, and Weyerhaeuser was very critical of Georgia-Pacific coming into our region. And yet Weyerhaeuser had something to do with bringing them here, because they were part-owners of the first plant that they bought. No timber involved with it. They were buying logs in the open log market for it.

But in 1955 Senator Neuberger, who was elected in 1954, and a bunch of former employees of the Bureau of Land Management, all of them lawyers except one, conned the Senate Interior Committee chairman, who was Senator Murray of Montana who was a man of sixty years of age. He paid little attention to what was going on. His staff ran the committee pretty much. They conned him and William Dawson, who was a black congressman from Chicago who was the chairman of the House Government Operations Committee, to create, not by resolution, but just informally a joint committee on federal timber in which a subcommittee of the government operations committee and the subcommittee of the Interior Committee of the Senate decided to hold a series of hearings to find out what the government timber problems were in the Northwest. They scheduled hearings beginning in early November of 1955. The first hearing was at Redding, the next at Klamath Falls, the next day at Medford, the next day at Roseburg, and then the next day at Eugene, take the weekend off, and then two days in Portland, and then one day in Aberdeen, one day in Seattle, and one day in

157 Spokane. It was just a man killing schedule for everybody. We decided that we had better take them on, because it looked like they were politicking for the 1956 election and that was all and that was all they were going to use it for. Our board created a special committee, assessed our members to raise some money, hired a firm of attorneys to help us prepare witnesses for this. And the firm of attorneys and myself prepared thirty-two witnesses to appear at these hearings to talk about all the problems of dealing with the government for timber: appraisals, scaling, rights of way, protection, attitudes, the whole works, anything that was pertinent to it. I was to be one of the principal witnesses. I was on the stand for a hundred and fifteen pages of testimony, a hundred and fifteen printed pages.

HKS: Wow. A lot.

WDH: In the first place we tried to get the Republicans to send some people to keep these guys honest, and all we could get was an eighty-year old congressman. Clare E. Hoffman from Michigan, who represented the fourth district of Michigan. He was a country lawyer from Allegan, Michigan. Allegan is a county in the southwestern corner of the state. The town of Holland where their tulips are growing is in that district. Benton Harbor is in it. It's the southwestern four or five counties in the district that fronts on Lake Michigan and then goes down against the Indiana line. That's where it is. I'd never met Mr. Hoffman, because I never had anything to do with the Government Operations Committee before. He was the ranking Republican on it, because he'd been in Congress a long time. We got the Republicans to send him. I was disappointed because I thought, "My god, an eighty-year old man." Well, I was wrong. This eighty- year old man was competent to take on all these Democrat lawyers like you never saw anybody in your life before. He was a country prosecutor in the best connotation of the term, and he kept them honest. He was just a pistol all the way. I went to all the hearings. It was terrible weather. We had terrible icy weather, freezing in Klamath Falls. When we got over in the fir region, it was milder, but it was terrible weather. I kidnapped him and took him by air away from the committee which was traveling by car from Klamath Falls to Medford because the roads were icy, and had him there two hours before the committee arrived.

The hearing records of this were voluminous. The testimony that was given in those hearings really set the groundwork for what needed to be done to put the government timber house in order, to really do a job for the economy. Because of the kind of testimony that we got into it and then the reports that were written by the committee. The reports were political, but the minority was allowed to write a report. The minority had a lot of help from outside to write the report, and you can guess who wrote the most of it. We really took them on, but nothing much ever happened as a result of that. But they did succeed in beating one of the congressmen they were after in the next election. Ellsworth of the fourth district of Oregon got defeated by a fellow by the name of Charlie Porter. They didn't do anything to Washington, because Washington was already pretty much a Democratic delegation in that time, so they couldn't do much there. But they did it to us in Oregon. That was their purpose basically.

158 A Job at GP

WDH: As a result of all this, the way we conducted ourselves, Georgia-Pacific had me come in in late November that year and offered me a job. They wanted me to work for them. I dealt with Jack Brandis, who is now deceased, and who had been a member of our board representing Georgia-Pacific, and he'd been a member of our board representing Willamette Valley Lumber Company, predecessor to Willamette Industries, prior to that. So I'd known him a long time. His father, who worked for Longview Fibre Company, was also on our board and was our vice-president. His father was an old country German and a fine man and a very good friend of mine. Well Owen Cheatham, who was the president and the founder of Georgia-Pacific, came into the conversation with Brandis and me. They offered me twice the salary I was getting with the Association. It was very tempting, you know, for a kid. I was forty years old. But the association for the first time in its life gave me a five hundred dollar bonus and told me to take a month's vacation with pay and go off and lie on a beach someplace and rest up. Because I was pooped out from these hearings. I worked for sixty solid days working in preparation of these hearings and then participating in them. I was really worn out. I was forty years old and I had a lot of energy and stamina, but not that much.

Ruth and I went to Mexico and spent a month lying on the beach at Puerta Vallarta. We went there for the peace and quiet we thought I needed. It was a little country fishing village, a great place. Four dollars and eighty cents a day for two of us to stay in this hotel including meals. The meals were good, good food. This wonderful girl that I was married to says, "Well, we better talk it over. You can go there. You won't approve of everything they want to do. They're money grubbers. Mr. Cheatham must be, the way he conducts himself, and Brandis is a tough guy. What they want, they want to hire you because you know everybody that owns the timber in the Northwest. They want to buy a lot more and you're going to be the guy that's going to be the entree to these people. Because you know everybody. You know the timber geography and you know the people who own it." There were a lot of family companies, that because of the inheritance taxes were willing to sell out if somebody made them an offer. I knew them all, because I was working with them all my life up until that point. So she says, "Money isn't everything. You don't get paid a lot, but we get paid enough to live the way we want." We didn't have any children, and there was apparently no chance of having any by that time. We were both forty years old. We'd talked adoption a lot, but we'd never done it, because I was never home. I was gone all the time with my work. I just figured a man needed to be home with youngsters to raise them. I was raised without a father, and I know what a tough job it is for a gal to do by herself. So we'd never adopted any.

She said, "We don't have social pretensions. We make enough money to live the way we are. Within a few years we'll be having to contribute to help our mothers because they're both apt to live to a great age"--which they both did to their late eighties. And she said, "At age forty you've got a job that you like, one that you've got lots of freedom in, much more than anybody in your kind of work, ability to go anyplace you want to go, do things you want to do, grow and develop professionally. Because they're liberal and generous to you in that respect because you've earned it by working hard for them and effectively. If you're smart enough at age forty to recognize you've got all that,

159 you're a millionaire." This was a bright girl. You know, she was brighter than I was, much brighter. She convinced me that I ought to stay where I was, and we did.

So I went back and had to tell Brandis and Cheatham. Cheatam said, "I don't understand it." "Well," I said, "Mr. Cheatam, you know it takes two kinds of people to make the world go. You like to make money. Some people probably call you a money grubber. But that's not bad, because you're the kind of a man that can attract capital, people who'll provide it for you, to go off and buy resources, manufacturing facilities, to provide society with commodities that it wants and needs. In the process of that you provide one hell of a lot of employment, and a lot of great things come out of what you do socially. That's good. You take a fellow like me, I got inspired by a fellow by the name of W. B. Greeley when I was kid that timber growing was an important thing in this region, that we had to do a better job of it, and that's what I've spent my whole life working on as a forestry missionary. I get one hell of a lot of compensation out of the fact that I know that I've got the important part, or a small hand but an important one, in the future of this region and all the people that are going to live here from now on and in the future. I don't make a hell of a lot of money, but I make enough to live the way I want to live. That additional compensation I get from the satisfaction is very important. I don't think you understand that." "No, sir," he said, "I don't." [chuckles]

HKS: Sure.

WDH: But I was right. The fact that he was a money grubber was an important thing. That's what made him go, and he was able to do all these things. And in the process he served society.

HKS: He just happened to be in the lumber business. He could have been in any other business. It wouldn't have mattered to him.

WDH: Any other business. Sure. Exactly. Right. He's gone now too. He died of a heart attack at a football game at Eugene in the arms of Bill Hunt, who was later the president of his company.

Land Withdrawals

HKS: Costs of land withdrawals. Wilderness was an issue. The creation of certain national parks like Olympic National Park. These land withdrawals have been going on a long time. So, what is the issue?

WDH: The issue is that Congress has never faced up to the social and economic costs of land withdrawals. I don't know how you bring it to their attention. We always forcibly brought it to their attention. In my initial testimony on the Wilderness Bill and in preparation of the materials to arm the witnesses that the Resources Development Council got to participate in those early hearings in 1958 when the Senate Interior Committee held the first field hearings, we had all the statistical information on the western United States, state by state, as to the significance of forestry, of mineralization, of agriculture, the whole works. I got all that stuff. Our own staff put that together. Most

160 of the data came out of the Statistical Abstract of the United States which always has very good data. The data that are in the Statistical Abstract are the best available on subjects like that. We reproduced all that stuff in easy-to-read tabular form so that people could use it. I got witness after witness to regurgitate the stuff just to impress upon the members of the committee that it wasn't for free, that when you did certain things like withdrawing land that was sedimentary basins, for example, that potentially was oil- and gas-producing, there was going to be an economic cost, and every economic cost has some social cost in terms of employment or unemployment, dislocation of families, of communities, of facilities like school systems, and that sort of thing. I'm afraid that all those data fell on deaf ears. I don't think anybody paid a god damned bit of attention to us on it. I guess I was a little bit academic, a little bit naive in that respect to think that such data were making the case. The other side used the emotional case entirely. Maybe that's what we should have done, in the opposite direction.

But the environmentalists never make an economic case for anything. They always make an emotional appeal that you've got to, the last little bit of wilderness that we have got, we've got to save it. We've only got 2 percent of the United States. [banging the table] These grandmotherly types that came and testified as they got a few of them at some of the hearings, lived in Park Avenue in New York or Nob Hill in San Francisco, would come before a hearing and say, "I'm not going to ever be able to use the wilderness, but it's very comforting to know that it's there." And these old ladies were living on fixed incomes for god's sake that were left to them by grandfathers probably, who acquired their means from before March 1, 1913, when a man made a dollar he got to keep it, before income taxes. Every damn one of them made it in natural resource industries or in real estate or in shipping or in railroading or something like that. They were the economic barons of their day. And yet these old ladies were sucked in by the Zahnisers and the Browers to contribute money to the cause, because emotionally they made the case for it. We never made an emotional case. I got emotional once in a hearing. I got in a hell of an argument. Senator Anderson and I really got into it. We got into a terrible mess.

HKS: Clinton Anderson.

WDH: Yes, he was chairman of the Senate Interior Committee, and he was of course one of the authors of the Wilderness Bill, and he was in favor of it. The old former secretary of agriculture--I guess I've got tell you the story about that. It's an important part of my concept of what occurred pending enactment of the Wilderness Bill.

HKS: Okay.

WDH: I've got to back just a little bit further. In 1952 I signed a personal service contract with the Bureau of Yards and Docks of the Navy to go look at the timber in the Subic Bay Naval Reservation on Luzon. The reason I did it, I got a call at home one Sunday from Charles L. Wheeler, who was then the executive vice-president of Pope and Talbot and a member of our association. "Bill, this is Charlie Wheeler. When can you go to the Philippines?" I said, "What?" "Well," he said, "Admiral Moeller is a friend of mine, and I had a drink with him a couple days ago at the Pacific Union Club,

161 and he's got a whole stack of dispatches on his desk from Admiral Radford who was CINCPAC and CINCPOA at the time, asking him why the hell they don't do something with all the timber in the Subic Bay Naval Reservation. Because we're building a big supply base in Okinawa, and we're having a hard time getting timber." "Well," I said, "Charlie, I'm not in the consulting business." "Yeah," but he said, "during the war, the government paid a lot of money to teach you about tropical timbers and all that. I think patriotically you ought to go help them out on it." All he was doing was taking care of this admiral friend of his with whom he'd had a drink who was crying his eyes out, who wanted to reduce that pile of dispatches from his commander. So I went and talked to the chairman of our board who was Ed Stamm at the time of Crown-Zellerbach. Well, Ed was a veteran of World War I. He had two boys. One was a prisoner of war in Germany in World War II, and the other boy practically lost his eyesight from the premature explosion of a torpedo that filled his eyes with little pieces of metal. Ed was a very patriotic guy. "God damn it," he said, "you've got to go to help them. We'll pay your salary while you're gone. Don't forget, when you enter the contract, charge them plenty to go." So I entered into this contract and went. Well, I took care of Charles L. Wheeler's problem by that.

Charles L. Wheeler and Clinton Anderson were buddies for forty years. They had both gone up through the chairs of International Rotary and both had been president. There's a great camaraderie between men who do things like that. I knew this. I decided when the Wilderness Bill came up in 1958, or maybe in '59, I guess the second go around. I was scared of Anderson, because Anderson was always nasty to witnesses and he was not nice to me. So I thought that what I would do is get Charles L. Wheeler to send him a telegram paving the way for me. So I called up Wheeler's office in San Francisco and he was gone. Pope and Talbot was in the steamship business, and he was off looking at their ships someplace. They had a company called Pacific-Argentine-Brazil Line, that went from the west coast of the United States to the east coast of South America. He was off someplace. I knew the girl who was his secretary, because I had been in their office in San Francisco. I conned her into writing the telegram, and I dictated over the phone to her. "Honorable Clinton B. Anderson, chairman of Senate Interior Committee, Washington, D.C. Dear, Clint," I told her to put in the salutation, because you can do that in a wire. You pay for it. "Dear Clint, Bill Hagenstein represents our industry. He's going to appear before your committee on the Wilderness Bill next week. I'll appreciate your extending him every courtesy. With warmest personal regards, Charles L. Wheeler." [laughs] So she sent the wire. And Charlie never saw it or never heard about it, I guess. He might have later.

I got there, and Clinton Anderson reads this wire and welcomed me to the committee like I was his brother. Then I pulled the faux pas of the century. I unlimbered my double-barreled, sawed-off shot gun and fired both barrels right in his belly. [laughs]

So I really worried like mad. I didn't know what to do about it. One of my good friends in Washington, D.C., was Henry Clepper's son-in-law, a boy from Pittsburgh by the name of Irving I. Davidson, who came to Washington, D.C., as a twenty-year old boy, appeared in the early days of the war as a SP-3 clerk in some department. He got to be an expediter in the War Production Board and got to meet all the captains of industry that were working down there as dollar-a-year men. And the first thing you know, he

162 ends up with a lobbying business of his own, a very successful one. He owned an interest in a plywood plant in Nicaragua. And he knew everybody. His two principal accounts were the Murchison family of Texas and the government of Israel. Those were his two principal accounts. He was married to Henry Clepper's daughter, Charlotte. He shared an office with Drew Pearson, the old columnist. In the American Legion Building, kitty-corner from the Statler Hotel at Sixteenth and K, southwest of the Hotel. [gestures] I used to go up there once in a while and have a drink with him. After the work day, I'd go up there and have a drink in his office. All those guys in Washington have refrigerators, you know. They had ice and booze and everything in there, and he and I would have a drink. So I went up there one night, and of course he introduced me to Pearson two or three times. So he and I were having a drink and I told him about this problem. I said, "I've got to get back in with Anderson some way." "Well," he said, "why don't you go over to his office and see him?" So the next day I did. I knew the girl that was a receptionist in Anderson's office. She was a beautiful Indian girl from New Mexico with a beautiful name. Three words. Beautiful last name. Eloise De La O. I walked in there. I said, "Good morning, Eloise." She said, "Mr. Hagenstein, you're not welcome in this office." You know, this was a couple days after I had committed the faux pas. She said, "The Senator is really mad at you." "Well," I said, "is there any chance that I could see him?" She said, "I wouldn't even ask him if you can see him. I don't think he would see you. It would just embarrass me to ask him, and it would embarrass you when he turns you down. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is." So I thanked her and got the hell out of there.

So that evening I went and had another drink with Mr. Davidson. Davidson said, "How long are you going to be here?" I said, "I can stay a couple days if necessary." "Well," he says, "meet me in the Carlton Hotel tomorrow night at five o'clock in the lobby. We'll go into the lounge and have a drink." So I did. Murchison's local man whose name was Robert Thompson had a suite on the top floor of the Carlton Hotel where he entertained. The Murchisons were wheelers and dealers and into everything. They owned the publishing firm of Hunt, Winston, and Rinehart. That's just one thing they owned. I found that out that night when we were up there later. So we had to have a drink in there. Davidson bribed the guy where we could look out and watch the people that came into the lobby that went into the elevator. The first guy that came in was Clinton P. Anderson. The next guy who came in was the secretary of the navy, John Connally, later the governor of Texas. The next guy that came in was Lyndon Johnson, who was then the vice-president of the United States. So after Johnson had gone upstairs, Irving said, "Now, it's time for us to go."

So up we go. We go into this room. He introduces me to Robert Thompson, Bob Thompson, the Murchison's man there. There was a bunch of girls up there, party girls, up in this room. These were beautiful girls all of them, but you could tell what they were. They were girls to entertain the boys. That's the kind of girls they were. After the introductions Thompson sits me down on a davenport between Johnson and Anderson. [both laugh] And of course I'm introduced to Johnson whom I've never met before. I'd seen him but never met him. He introduced me to Connally whom I'd never met before. Anderson says, "I know Hagenstein," he says [chuckles] glum, glum, glum. So we all had a drink. We talk about a desalinization plant that I had just visited a month before in Curacao where the Holt family and my wife and I had made a trip around the Caribbean

163 three years before. Then we got skunked because the plane wasn't called, so we went and repeated the part from which we had been skunked. We repeated it. And we stayed in this private club owned by the Shell Oil Company, Piscadera Beach Club. And I saw this big desalinization plant. And I always wanted to visit one, and I told the manager in the hotel. And he said, "The chief engineer is my best friend, a Dutchman." And so Nils Holt and I got a four-hour trip through this big desalinization plant. They take the sea water and make potable water out of it and save all the by-products.

I told them this. I don't know how it got in the conversation. Anderson gets very interested, because he's got a piece of legislation in there, a bill authorizing the appropriation of fifteen million dollars for the Office of Saline Waters to make a study of this stuff. And the Murchisons were interested, because 80 percent of all the men who were competent professionals, or technicians, in this field were in their employ. When this bill was passed, which it was by the way, the only people who could get the contract to do this work for the government were going to be the Murchisons. Anderson was the author of the bill, and it was before his committee. It was before the Interior Committee.

HKS: So he was up there having a drink on the Murchisons then.

WDH: Yes. Well, he's associated with them. So after we had had a couple of drinks and sat around talked about everything. I talked to the vice-president, talked to Connally, talked to Anderson just a little bit. Davidson gave me the nod, and Davidson says, "It's time for us to go." He got up, and I said good-bye to everybody and thanked Thompson for their hospitality and off we went. We went out and had dinner. "Now, Bill," he says, "you go see Anderson before you go home now. He'll see you. I'll tell you what you just learned tonight. My friend, you now have sponsorship, real sponsorship, because you were the guest of the Murchisons and because everybody else was up there. And you were sitting between the chairman of the Interior Committee and the vice-president of the United States. And you were backstopped by the secretary of the navy, who's a very important part of their team."

I went to see him, and very friendly, very friendly. I don't know if I should really even tell this story, but it's my experience with learning about sponsorship. [chuckles]

HKS: Sure. Go ahead.

WDH: That's the end of the story really.

HKS: What happened with the plants? The bill was passed.

WDH: Oh, I'm sure the Murchisons got the contract. I don't know. I never followed up on that. I just suspicioned that that was what was going to happen. But the other thing I did when I got home, because they talked about Holt, Winston, and Rinehart publishing house that night, the Murchisons owned it. When I got home, I called up a stockbroker, I said, "Can you get me an annual report of Holt, Winston, and Rinehart." "Yeah," he says. Well, in a week or so we got it. Guess who was on the board? [pause]

164 HKS: Clinton?

WDH: Clinton P. Anderson. You got it. That's the way they pay those guys off. You know, directors get fees.

HKS: Sure ten, fifteen thousand a year or whatever it is.

WDH: So I lost all respect for Clinton Anderson as a senator and as a man after that. I didn't think he was kosher.

Clemons Tree Farm

HKS: Bill, during the break you said you wanted to tell me an anecdote.

WDH: When the Weyerhaeuser people decided to rededicate the Clemons Tree Farm after it had been a tree farm for fifty years, which was in the summer of 1991, they had a big celebration at Montesano, Washington, which is right adjacent to the Clemons Tree Farm. I was invited to come and attend the ceremony. The formal ceremony was speeches by politicians and a few public figures. It was at the high school auditorium in Montesano. Following that, about three hundred of the people who had been specifically invited for this were taken in buses, given a box lunch on the bus to eat on the way to the woods. We went out in the woods where they had a very interesting ridge top that gave you a great vista of beautiful second-growth timber every place you looked. They had a bunch of bleachers out there for three hundred people to sit in. They had cut a lot of the young timber out and made a big walkway from where the buses would stop on top of the road on the ridge to walk out on this little spur. They covered it with alder chips so that no one would get their feet muddy or dusty or wet or anything. The weather turned out well, which in our region is always a fortuitous thing when you have a thing like that planned months in advance.

It was a beautiful day. There were two speakers out there. One was Art Smyth who was president of the Society of American Foresters and who had started his forestry career working on the Clemons Tree Farm way back in 1941. That was as a youngster right out of school before he went off in the war. The other speaker was Jack Creighton who is now the Weyerhaeuser chief executive. Before we went out there, I went into the men's room. Standing adjacent to him at the urinal was my old friend Dave Weyerhaeuser, who's eighty years of age. When we both got through and had washed our hands, we shook hands and he said, "Bill, the industry made one hell of a mistake when they let you retire, because since you did nobody's been telling the story about what the industry's doing in forestry in this region." I should have had a tape recording of that and sent it to Charlie Bingham and rubbed his nose in it for having quit our association in 1978, two years before I retired. I didn't of course, but I'd like to. [laughs]

HKS: Dave has never been active in the company, has he?

WDH: He was on their board of directors until he was seventy years of age. They have a mandatory retirement. They have to retire from their board when they're seventy. Oh

165 yes, he was an employee of the company. When I first worked for the Association in 1941, Dave was in charge of what then was called the Reforestation and Land Department.

HKS: I see.

WDH: So he was very active in it. Dave is a very religious man, very sincerely religious man.

HKS: I understand.

WDH: He spent a lot of his own fortune in doing such things as getting some missionaries to go to an Indian part of a country like Ecuador for example and take a sawmill down there and teach the people how to run sawmills and translate the Bible into their native tongues and proselyte them to become Christians. He's done a lot of that throughout his life. It's the most important thing, to him, that he's ever done probably. But he was a good influence on a lot of the early day forestry work in Weyerhaeuser when they were just getting their feet wet in it, because they had some principals who didn't believe in it. He being a member of the family and also a member of the board and being a significant stockholder had some influence on that. He was a good helpmate for Phil, his cousin, to bring them into the kind of forestry that they ultimately did and that they've continued. So I think that Dave probably never got as much credit for his part in it, because he was not a guy who pushed himself. He never was on our board of directors, but he always came to our annual meetings. And he liked them. He didn't like some things about me. He didn't like my use of what he thought of as blasphemous language on occasion and told me so. [chuckles] But we were always good friends. And I always admired and respected him, because I knew he was an honest and sincere man in his religious fervor. Some people exhibit that kind of fervor for religious grandstanders, and Dave wasn't that kind of a man. Well, that's an interesting story that he would say that to me, that no one's been telling the story and that they never should've let me retire.

The Forest Story Changes

HKS: By your observation, how did the story that the association was telling, how did that change when you left?

WDH: Let me say first that the economy changed very markedly. It turned down. The economy of our industry turned down very markedly in the early 1980s when these people who were living on government timber, which were half the members of the association, because half the members of the industry didn't own any land or timber. They depended entirely upon outside sources. When they got stuck with all these high priced timber sales that in the fervor of a continuing rising market during the period of inflation that these fellows bidding against one another so lavishly that they bid as much as two and three times as much for the timber as it was worth. Then when the products turned down, the prices went down. Of course they couldn't eat these sales, because the economics were just against them. So immediately when that happened, one of the first

166 things that an industry that feels it's getting into a depression does, the first thing they cut off is public relations. My god, it was a time when they needed more, because of the circumstances!

HKS: So the main shift was a loss in income for the association. It wasn't that the association changed its idea of what to sell.

WDH: I don't think so. No. I think the association was still motivated to do it. Different personalities involved, different kinds of people, of course. My successor was a man that had been there for years and years, a very competent guy. I hired him way back in 1948, and he and I were closely associated for thirty-two years together. Norm Bjorklund by name. A fine forester, an able guy, honest man. A veteran of the war, came back after the war, finished up schooling at Oregon State in forestry. I hired him right out of school on the recommendation of Walter McCulloch, who was the dean of the forestry school then and who was a man that I admired and respected very greatly. So Norman of course was a logical man to succeed me, although the association fussed around for six or seven months deciding what the hell to do, and they gave him the job. Then the market turned down like mad, and he just didn't get the resources to do the kinds of things that we had been doing previously. He knew how to do it.

Gosh, in the field of public relations Norman had a weekly television program for about ten years in Portland on one station. We sold the idea to the station that they ought to be articulating what was going on in forestry in our region. I used to do it once in a while, but Norman was the one that carried it, and he was terrific at it. He was really good at it. He hadn't had as much experience in articulating what we were up to before public bodies like the Congress for example, but he began to do that after my retirement. He had some previous hearing experience because from time to time I'd put him into that on purpose to give him the chance to learn how to do it. And he was good at it. He was articulate, he was knowledgeable, and he was honest. Of course, that was the best thing in the world for getting credibility with a committee of the Congress. If you told them the truth all the time, why, people would believe you, but if you lied to them once you killed yourself.

HKS: I understand that.

WDH: A lot of people in the lobbying business never learned that. Even if the answer to a question was detrimental to the case you were trying to make, if that were the truth, that's what you had to tell them. And that's what we always did. You know why we did? Because we were brought up by W. B. Greeley, and that's all he ever did all his life. All his life.

HKS: Who's running the association now?

WDH: The head of the Northwest Forestry Association, which is sort of the successor to what had been the Industrial Forestry Association, is the president. They don't call their association executives "executive vice-presidents" anymore. They are all "presidents" now. The "elected executive" is the "chairman of the board" or something like that. The president now, who is the manager, is a fellow by the name of Jim

167 Geisinger, who's an Oregon State forestry graduate, an able young guy that had worked in association work beginning in Douglas County for the Douglas County Timber Operators. Then he went to work for Western Forest Industries Association for a while. Then they hired him when Norman retired. Then they changed the association's name and activities.

HKS: I see a Wally Carey listed. I went to school with a Wally Carey.

WDH: That's the same Wally Carey that you went to school with. Wally was our district forester at Nisqually for western Washington when he was hired to work for us. Then we moved him to Portland after he had been district forester for several years and made him our director of private forestry. He was in charge of our genetics program and our nursery program and the Tree Farm Program. Then when the association changed its name, they split off all the nurseries. What are called the IFA Nurseries Inc. are no longer a part of the association. It's a separate corporation and it's for profit. It's no longer a nonprofit organization like we were for nearly forty years, growing trees and selling them at cost. They now try to make a profit. I don't understand why they did that. I don't know any of the details of it, because I wasn't involved with it in any way.

Public relations-wise, telling the story-wise, it may have been a mistake, because those nurseries gave our association the opportunity for credibility in forestry that no other association in the United States ever had. Because we were in the tree growing business. I could tell people that I personally was in charge of a nursery operation that provided five hundred million trees to reforest a million acres of land. Boy, that's really saying something. And it was a hell of a story. It gave us credibility way beyond that of anybody else. Well, that's an aside, but the single biggest problem that our industry's had in the last decade is not telling the story. Here they've been gearing up recently trying to get ready to do a lot of it, to tell the story, to get people realizing that forestry is important in this country, important to consumers, but they may be ten years too late.

HKS: I've heard that companies are really gearing up now.

WDH: They should have always kept up. They should never have given it up. I made many public appearances before groups. Once when I was the president of SAF, I got lots of invitations, of course, to make speeches outside our region like to the National Association of State Foresters. At their annual meetings I spoke a couple times. Alaska State Chamber of Commerce invited me up there. Southern Pine Association, or I guess by that time the name had been changed to Southern Forest Products, invited me to come to New Orleans and paid my way to come. I never accepted speaking engagements when I worked for the association outside our own region unless people reimbursed us for the travel expense. I always did that. So Southern Pine paid my way to go to New Orleans and make the talk. State Foresters we didn't charge, of course, but any private group that would invite you to do that, we would charge them for the actual expense and never had any trouble getting it. An outfit like the Alabama Forest Products Association, inviting me to come down and speak at their annual meeting in Mobile, paid my way, first class airplane transportation, hotel and meals, whatever. It was always done. Because I always gave them a good show. I always had something to say. I was well-prepared, and having had a lot of experience in public platforms, why, I

168 was entertaining sometimes. I told people many times that it wasn't part of my job description, but telling the story became a very important part of my job for forty years. I kept track of my appearances. In thirty-five years I made a public appearance on the average of once every ten working days. About seven hundred and seventy public appearances. And I have often told people, "No one really has that much to say, but I said it anyway." [chuckles]

HKS: That's a lot. Not very many politicians have made that many speeches, except during election time I guess.

WDH: I was going to say, thank god. [both laugh]

High Yield Forestry

HKS: You started this with your anecdote about what Dave Weyerhaeuser told you at the Clemons. That leads cleverly into one of the items on our outline. What do you want to say about Weyerhaeuser High Yield Forestry?

WDH: I was a good observer, because I visited Weyerhaeuser tree farms continuously for many years and, of course, knew personally all their foresters, not just a handful of them, but I knew them all. I still do. I don't know some of the younger people now that have come aboard in the last ten years, but Weyerhaeuser did an exceptionally fine job of putting their forestry house in order in every respect. I think they gee-whizzed it a little bit in some of their public relations on the High Yield Forestry and that sort of thing, but that isn't too bad, because sometimes when people gee-whiz their public relations and get ahead of the performance, it makes them catch up in performance to make the whole public relations story honest. I think by and large that their public relations had been good, not only for their own company, but for the industry as well.

HKS: In a couple of sentences, what was the program?

WDH: The High Yield Forestry Program was to take advantage of the productive capacity of our soil by really utilizing it. It's a kind of management using genetically improved planting stock, planting areas promptly following harvest and slash burning if necessary, pre-commercial thinning when the stands were ten to fifteen years of age to get ideal stocking to take full advantage of the site, fertilization to increase the yield because of the reaction of these young stands to urea fertilizers, and to make certain that whenever there were any kind of disasters that the salvage be done very promptly and the areas reforested.

Nobody ever did a better job of taking care of a natural disaster than Weyerhaeuser did following the eruption of Mount St. Helens. They went in there and salvaged all that timber. If the government who owned so much of it adjacent had done the same thing, the country would have been better off. The government let most of its timber rot away. They haven't done much about it. Of course when the Congress created the Volcanic National Monument that's still under the jurisdiction of the Forest Service, they just quit in there. They're going to leave the thing to show people what happened as a result of

169 the eruption. Some of that's okay, but they wasted a lot of timber and they wasted a lot of productive land that should be growing more timber. So here, right adjacent to them, here's what Weyerhaeuser did in their lands. The state of Washington did the same thing. The state of Washington owned quite a bit of land up in there, and the State Department of Natural Resources did an exceptionally fine job of getting in there promptly and doing that salvage and getting the areas back into production.

In June 1991, Dick Jordan arranged with John Keatley, who's Weyerhaeuser's forester on the St. Helens Tree Farm, to have one of their young foresters take four couples of us on an all-day trip up in there. He provided the lunch and everything else. We had a wonderful trip. Jordan is a Longview boy, and he's got a lot of friends there. He's got one friend there, a fellow in the construction business, this chap and he grew up together. He and his wife were along. Then they had Zane Smith and his wife. Zane Smith who is retired from the Forest Service and now represents the American Forestry Association in the western United States. He's kind of their field representative and now lives in Springfield or Eugene. Jean and I were along. Well, we had a marvelous trip. You'd go up there and see what the heck they'd done in a decade in that area that was so devastated by the eruption. It's just a marvelous thing to see. It's a great feather in the company's cap, and they've articulated it well. I mean they've photographed it and they've made movies and everything else. They've done a good job with it, and it certainly sets a fine example for anybody else that gets hit by a disaster like that.

Now, here we've got the terrible disaster in northeastern Oregon where the government owns most of the land except for Boise Cascade, that's a significant owner over there, which is working hard on salvaging its stuff. This insect infestation is completely out of hand over there, and it's just crying to be salvaged and the land put back into shape. At the rate that they've been going at it, we're going to end up with a fire disaster that's going to be monumental in the history of fire.

HKS: Does the Forest Service agree with that opinion?

WDH: I think the men on the ground understand, but there's nobody up in the upper hierarchy that seems to have enough zip to get after it. They're scared of everybody. They're scared of their own shadows right now. They're not motivated to want to go out and do the kind of job of forestry that every one of them knows how to do. Hell, their own research has taught them how to do a lot of these things. We spend all this money for research, and what the hell are we doing with it? We're frittering it away. It's a crime. It's a crime against the land. It's a crime against the consumer. It's a crime against society.

HKS: Is the basic problem that the Forest Service has to prepare impact statements for all those operations?

WDH: Oh yes, that's a terrible millstone around their neck to slow up and to delay unnecessarily every kind of an operation that is designed to react to an emergency of any kind. It's not good. The anti-forestry forces in the United States are cleverly at work twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, figuring out ways to appeal or litigate to stop everything, and they've been very successful at it. After you've

170 been slugged that way for ten years, you can see why the initiative disappears in the agencies. They're worn out from it. And while I'm critical of them not doing the job, I'm sympathetic to the problem they've got because of the legislation and the regulations that allow these people to be irresponsible litigants and irresponsible appealees. The idea of having an appeal and having the right to go to court is fine, but it should be done for the benefit of society and not be detrimental all the time. And that's the problem that we're faced with.

HKS: Why would the environmentalists not want an insect infestation to be stopped?

WDH: Pete, I wish I could answer that. I don't understand. I can't understand that at all. Their whole technique seems to be to put roadblocks in front of the agencies at all times on everything. A lot of the environmentalists are very intelligent people and sensitive people probably. They don't want to bring the economy of the country to a standstill. Down deep in their hearts they can't want to do that, because they know it's detrimental to society. So what are they after? The ones that are the professionals that run these things, they're just money raisers. They're missionaries for being opposed to something that will entice people to send in the money. How many letters do you get a year from organizations panhandling you for money with a scare letter that tells you that the last old growth tree is going to disappear because the Forest Service is going to allow the industry, that wants to make a profit from it, to log it?

HKS: When a company like Weyerhaeuser makes a very public and very substantial capital investment in forestry, what influence does that have on the other industries in the area? To the Georgia-Pacifics and the Crown-Zellerbachs and the Pope and Talbots. Do they say, "We've got to do that too?"

WDH: All the major land-owning companies are doing a high grade job today in intensive forestry.

HKS: But Weyerhaeuser's were more substantial?

WDH: They were ahead of them. They were first in some of these things. Once the others studied it and saw what was going on, everybody wanted to emulate it, because people suddenly recognized you had this productive land and the only way in the world you were going to continue to stay in business was to use the productivity by managing it as well as you knew how. The incentive was there. As timber became a valuable resource, you couldn't prevent people from wanting to do something about it. Every year we were doing more, and every year we were doing better. It's just been a continuing thing.

When you get a turn down in the market, there's a little slack off for a while in the case of some of them, but look at their reports every year now. I'm a stockholder in about fourteen companies in our industry, all of them land-owning companies. I don't buy stocks in ones that don't have real assets, but I buy ones that own land. I read their annual reports. Their annual reports in most cases feature, among other things, what they're doing in forestry. It's really amazing what some of them do and what they are doing, and they're telling their stockholders. And they're getting their stockholders

171 interested in it now. They ought to use their stockholders more for political purposes to get after some of the politicians that are hurting the chances of practicing better forestry in the United States. They don't do that too well. The P.R. internally in some of the companies is not very good in that respect.

Selling Timber Land

WDH: There's been a tendency too in the last few years for some major companies in our industry to sell their lands, and they're making a hell of a mistake. Let me just tell you how it started, how I got started on this theme. Just about the time I was retiring, maybe a year later, about 1982. Resources for the Future held a big conference in Portland, and it was an invitational thing only. I wasn't invited. The only reason I was there, Georgia-Pacific had been invited and John Wishart who was then their chief forester, and their headquarters was still in Portland, had some obligation to go to the South and he asked me if I'd like to go. He said, "If you go you'll have to wear a thing that says 'W. D. Hagenstein, Georgia-Pacific Corporation.' Would that embarrass you?" I said, "Not a bit. I'd love to go to it." So I was registered as W. D. Hagenstein, Georgia- Pacific. I went there and got my name tag and all that. Well, William Creson was the moderator of the first session. I guess he was the chairman of the board of Crown- Zellerbach at the time, or at least the chief executive officer. I never knew him until I saw him that day. But this was the time when the rumors were rife all over the Northwest that Crown-Zellerbach was going to peddle all its lands or sell out to somebody. When Dave Zellerbach, J. D. Zellerbach--his name was James David, but everybody called him "Dave". I didn't know him that way. I always called him "Mr. Zellerbach." But when Dave Zellerbach was running that company, here was a company that had a better social consciousness than almost any company in our industry. Nobody could compare with them in our region. The people who worked for them, the people who lived in the communities where their plants were or their logging operations were, the people in the communities felt that way about them. always had one great advantage over any other segment of our industry in that they ran the plants continuously. They run them twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty days a year. Shut them down for five days a year to reline the digesters and that's all. So it's wonderful steady employment which of course is a wonderful thing in any community. And then Crown was very good about letting people know within their organization, their employees and their communities, what they were up to. They had a very fine public relations man in the early days by the name of Billy Welch, who had been the owner and editor of the Port Angeles Evening News. This guy, having been raised in a small mill community, knew the kind of thing that needed to be told to people. And when Crown hired him as their P.R. man about 1939 or '40, he began to do that, and he did a marvelous job. Then when he passed out of the picture the young fellows that came along were brought up in the same tradition; they did a good job.

Crown was beginning to get the reputation, because of the rumors that they were about to peddle their lands, that they were a bunch of liquidators. People in the communities were beginning to hate their guts. Their employees didn't like them. The politicians that represented them, the county commissioners and the state legislators in the districts where they owned lands or had plants, were beginning to feel that way about them. So I

172 decided at this meeting that you and I attended that I'd go up and grab Mr. Creson. So when the morning session was over, remember they moved us from one side of this big, Red Lion Motel over to another place for lunch, so as they began to adjourn for lunch I went up and grabbed him. I said, "Mr. Creson, you've got a hell of a problem." That got his attention. He said, "What's that?" I told him just what I've told you, how people were reacting. I said, "If you people sell those lands, you're making one hell of a mistake, an error, in business judgment, because nobody, nobody will ever again be able to own seven hundred thousand acres of the highly productive lands in which your company's done a fine job of putting them in good shape as you have. The low book value that you carry on those lands, nobody will ever have that chance again. If you sell them, you're making a hell of an error in business judgment." I didn't introduce myself to him as a consulting forester which I was at the time. I introduced myself as a long time Crown- Zellerbach stockholder. I owned three hundred shares of their stock. That's all I said to him. I got his attention. There's no damn question of it.

He assured me then, as we were walking over toward the eating place, that they weren't going to sell the lands in the Douglas-fir region. He said, "We might sell the stuff at Chemult." "Well," I said, "you shouldn't have been over there in the first place"--all that lodgepole pine over on the edge of the desert--"but I'm talking about the Douglas-fir region lands. Those are the ones I know about. I'm intimately familiar with these tree farms that you own in Washington and Oregon." He assured me, just the two of us talking, that they weren't going to do anything. So I was going to leave on a nationwide trip about two days later, so I went back to my office that afternoon, and I confirmed our conversation in a letter to him. I was delighted to learn that they weren't going to sell the lands in the Douglas-fir region. Then the bastard went on along with his colleagues and their golden parachutes and let Sir James Goldsmith of England get them. And he paid them a fraction of what they were worth.

HKS: Why did they do that? Why would they sell below value?

WDH: Who knows? Who knows? I just don't understand that.

HKS: If you have a million dollars, why sell it for a half million?

WDH: Crown-Zellerbach Corporation was not in financial difficulties. It was a very successful company. It was a terrible mistake to do it. You know what happened, a lot of their employees got laid off, and it just disrupted the communities and everything else. And then Goldsmith, he hasn't even got it anymore! He sold all the mills to James River Corporation or somebody else. James River bought the one at Camas and at Wauna. I don't know what happened to the ones in the South. I don't know what happened to St. Francisville, Louisiana, or Bogalusa, whether Sir James Goldsmith got those lands and the plants down there. I really don't know. But I do know now that Goldsmith has traded the Pacific Northwest lands to this mining company that Hanson owned, and Hanson Trust now owns the Crown-Zellerbach lands, all operated under a company called Cavenham. That is a company that Goldsmith had organized to take over the Crown-Zellerbach tree farms. Hanson Trust has got them, operating as Cavenham, and hopefully they'll continue to do the kind of forestry job that Crown- Zellerbach had done. No one thought that Goldsmith would. Everybody thought that

173 Goldsmith would become a liquidator, because that's what he did with a lot of the lands that he acquired, when he acquired the old Diamond Match Company, or Diamond National or International, as it later was called.

There was a big rumor abroad then that Rayonier was going to sell its lands. Nobody has more productive lands in the Douglas-fir region than Rayonier.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: The land they have in Clallam, Grays Harbor, Jefferson, and Pacific counties, Washington, are it. You know, the Polson property of eighty-five thousand acres would grow a hundred and twenty million feet of timber a year. Eighty-five thousand acres! That's how good the land was. Rumor was that they were about to sell out. The rumor was that Scott was about to sell out, and Scott did. Scott sold all their lands in the state of Washington, two hundred and fifty, sixty thousand acres. They sold them for, in my opinion, for a hundred million dollars less than they were worth. A hundred million dollars less than they are worth. Why? Who knows? Here they've got this productive pulpmill at Everett. It's a very profitable mill, sulfite mill, the biggest sulfite mill in the Douglas-fir region. It makes tissues for the big California market. Everybody knows that Californians are well-fed, the best market for toilet tissue in the whole world is California. Scott made money on that plant from the time they acquired it, and now they haven't got a single acre of land behind it. They're going to depend entirely upon chips for running that plant and low grade logs, and where are they going to get them? They're going to get them from log buying sawmills that depend on national forest timber when the government is not going to practice forestry in northwestern Washington anymore. It's a dumb thing they did.

When the rumor was that Rayonier was going to sell, when the rumor was that Scott was going to sell, I wrote an article entitled "Don't Sell the Land," and it was published in the Southern Lumberman. For years I wrote articles for the Southern Lumberman. Stanley Horn was a very good friend of mine, and he liked the things I wrote. He invited me to write an article every year for years for their Christmas issue. And after I was retired, his successor Jack Whaley hired me to write articles, and they paid me for some of them. He paid me so much a word. I told him I was pretty wordy. He said, "Well, we'll take care of that in the editorial department." [laughs] He was a very interesting man. I went to see him a couple of times in Nashville. He and I were good friends. He didn't like Stanley too well. He and Stanley were colleagues for years, but he called Stanley a squirrel. He says, "He collected everything, and never threw anything away." [laughs]

I want to tell you one more thing about this article. I wrote this article "Don't Sell the Land," and then I reprinted it. The association didn't print it. I printed it. W. D. Hagenstein and Associates, Consulting Foresters. Then I sent a copy of it with a letter to every board chairman and president of every major land-owning timber company in the United States. I got a hell of a bunch of industry responses. And one of them from a company in which I was a stockholder, Great Northern Nekoosa, which later sold out to Georgia-Pacific. When the rumor was that GP was trying to get hold of them, I wrote Freat Northern Nekoosa a letter and said, "Don't sell out. Don't sell the land. Don't make

174 the mistake of selling the land." I got back a letter from the chairman of the board of that company that assured me they weren't going to sell it. Hell, in ninety days they sold it anyway. [chuckles]

HKS: There was obviously a feeling at the high levels of corporate management that land owning is what, a dangerous long-term proposition?

WDH: Some of them may think that, or they get into a bind where the environmental requirements in the pulp and paper segment of our industry have become so excessive to satisfy the rules of either the federal government or the states or both that these people need capital all of the time. Some of these companies spend as much as two or three hundred million dollars on a plant that's already got five or six hundred million dollars invested in it, to allow them to continue to discharge their effluent, to discharge what goes into to the air or water to meet the environmental requirements, none of which expenditure adds to the value of the product they make. They need the capital. During that period in the '80s when we had the terrible inflation that came along with Carter, Reagan tried to do something about it and wasn't able to do so for several years, during that period of inflation when you borrowed money to do anything-. These companies would borrow working capital. They had to pay 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18 percent for it. If they had assets they could sell, they were selling assets in order to get the cash, rather than go out in the money market and borrow it. And that's what happened to us partly.

When you had a bunch of productive land that there was a market for, that a speculator would buy--and I think that Goldsmith was a speculator; I don't think he ever intended to be an operator--the tendency was to sell to them. I think that's what these bean counters, these MBAs from Harvard and Yale and Princeton and wherever in the hell they go to school, they don't understand that the best long term insurance that you've got for safeguarding a capital investment in a substantial wood using plant like a pulp and paper complex is having enough land behind it to provide most of the wood you need from your own land, because the cheapest wood they'll ever get is that which they grow themselves, not what they buy from someone else. And I don't think these men understand that. I think the master of business administration degree has been an enemy of forestry ever since these ivy league schools have been turning these guys out.

Because they understand finance, these are the kinds of guys that gravitate to the tops of these companies and they become the men that set the policies. They don't understand that basic to the forest products business is landownership. That's the basic thing. You grow your own timber to the extent that you can do it and depend upon outside sources for as little as possible. Let me give you an example. The Longview Fibre Company, one of the most interesting companies in our whole industry, owned for a long time mostly by two families, the Wertheimer and the Wollenberg families. Harry Wollenberg was the chairman of the board of that company and operated it until he was ninety-two years of age. His son, Dick Wollenberg, who's the chairman of it now, was of retirement age when his father finally gave him a chance to run it.

That company was brought to Longview in 1927 by the Long-Bell Lumber Company to build a seventy-five ton a day kraft mill on the Long-Bell site, a piece of land that Long-

175 Bell gave to them practically, and then gave them a contract for all the leftover material that couldn't be used in the manufacture of lumber that would be available for chipping to provide raw material for that pulpmill. That pulpmill was built with the idea of never having anything in the way of raw material except chips that came from the Long-Bell mills adjacent. They never owned any land. The company began to expand as it became successful in the business and added digesters, added capacity, and built it up to a hundred and fifty tons a day, two hundred tons a day, and so on. And by the early days of the war, about 1942 or '3, they hired Arnold Brandis who had worked for the Northwest Lumber Company, a lumber manufacturing mill in Hoquiam. They had shut down. They'd liquidated all their timber and had gone out of business. Longview Fibre hired Arnold Brandis to look after their wood supply for them, and Arnold Brandis told these people that owned the company, tightly held by two families mainly then, that they ought to take the money that they were piling up in undistributed profits--and they had lots of them--and go out and buy lands. And he started to buy land.

Before he retired, the company had three hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, a lot of it young second-growth timber, a lot of it cutover land. They went in there and they did a hell of a job of forestry on it. Today it owns five hundred thousand acres of land. It's very successfully operated, produces about two thousand tons of pulp a day on that mill site, has eighteen hundred employees in Longview that never have been laid off, work all the time. Ninety-nine percent of the wood that's used in that mill is leftovers from the manufacture of lumber and plywood. Ninety-nine percent in the form of chips or sawdust. Their lands, their tree farms that they operate, they'll sell a log buying sawmill a ten-year supply of timber on a contract.

He buys it from it them. They'll sell him ten years of stumpage. So a man is encouraged to go in there and make the investment in the mill, because he knows he can amortize it, so he'll do a good job in lumber manufacture. Then under their arrangement, he'll put in a chipper. They'll make a deal with him that they get first turn down on his chips. They don't tie him up on a price. They'll pay him the market price, but they get first turn down on it, the chips that come out of their own timber. And they've got eight or ten, forty to fifty million a year sawmills that are doing business with them. It's a wonderful arrangement. They've done a good job.

They don't sell the land. Boy, they know that land is valuable to them. Now that company logs for its own account a hundred million feet of logs a year. They sell maybe half of them in the export market and the rest of them they sell domestically. It's a well-operated a company, well-managed land. They've done a marvelous job. Dick Wollenberg that runs it today must be seventy-five years and he's the active manager of it. He also plays the bassoon in the Southwest Washington Symphony. [chuckles] He's a hell of a guy, as was his father.

Capital Gains

HKS: Let's move on to capital gains, an issue that's been debated for more than fifty years. There was a major convulsion in this, about ten years ago.

176 WDH: Well, 1986. In the early 1960s when Kennedy was president, he tried to take it away from us, and we took him on, and we beat the beat hell out of him. One of the old alcoholics from Arkansas, Wilbur Mills, was the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. There was no way in the world that the Democratic National Party was going to take that away from us. In the first place Arkansas is a very important forestry state. Arkansas has probably as much acreage of well-managed forest lands as any state in the union. They've been at it a long time. Those old companies down there, those big family-owned companies that now are mostly owned by public corporations, did a good job. Dierks did a good job. Crossett did a good job. The Fordyce guys did a good job. Ozan Pine did a good job. They all did a good job in managing their lands for a long time. I mean, they got started early. Like Crossett started way back in 1920. In Louisiana, companies like Urania, the same thing. Georgia-Pacific owns Crossett, and they own Urania. Weyerhaeuser owns Dierks and so on. The old Southern Lumber Company that was Dave Weyerhaeuser's father's company is now part of Potlatch.

Anyway capital gains, we talked about it a little bit earlier when I told you that we as an association worked with the people nationally that put the idea together and finally got it enacted into law in 1944, the Bailey Amendment to the revenue code.

HKS: Right.

WDH: Section 631, subsections A and B. Roosevelt vetoed it. Senator Barkley, who was the majority leader of the Senate at the time, overrode it. I commend you his speech, when he made the speech about it on the floor of the Senate; it's one of the best forestry speeches ever made in the United States Senate, because he understood it. And the most important testimony that was ever made in behalf of that legislation when it was being considered by the Congress was by a fellow by the name of Fahrenbach. He was a forester who was a timber valuation engineer for the Bureau of Internal Revenue as the Internal Revenue Service was then called. He testified that under the income tax laws of the United States prior to the Bailey Amendment, that no sawmill owner could afford to own more than fifteen years cut for his mill. Well, obviously if you could only own fifteen years cut because of the tax laws, because you were being taxed on the appreciation in the value of timber as income rather than as a capital gain, a man would cut fifteen years and liquidate and quit. You couldn't practice forestry on fifteen-year rotations. That was very important testimony to help bring that legislation into being.

The minute it became law is when we really began to practice forestry in the United States, because for the first time the people who owned the land had the capital as a result of the treatment of the appreciation in the value of timber over the March 1, 1913, values as a capital gain to put back into the land. That's where we got the money for our protection, for our reforestation, for our improved utilization, for everything we did. It was a great thing. It was a great incentive for the practice of forestry.

And then here in 1986, a senator from the principal timber growing state in the union, number one forestry state in the union, Mr. Packwood, chairman of the Finance Committee of the Senate, allows it to be taken away from us in the Revenue Act of 1986. I never could understand why he allowed that to happen.

177 HKS: Has there been some kind of an economic study of the impact of the loss of capital gains? A lot of things were predicted.

WDH: I'm sure there has been, but I don't really know.

HKS: Okay.

WDH: I was a witness before the Ways and Means Committee when the Kennedy Administration was attempting to take it away from us, in 1963 I think it was. I was one of the principal witnesses along with a lot of others from the industry. I also appeared later when I was president of the Society of American Foresters. I appeared as a witness for sustaining capital gains treatment. We had a great break then. The chairman of the Ways and Means Committee at the tail end of the struggle, long before Packwood was on the scene in the Senate Finance Committee, was Al Ullman, a congressman from Oregon. He was the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and of course he was sympathetic to the continuation of capital gains. We had a problem within the industry on the capital gains in that most of the purchasers of public timber and the companies that lived exclusively on public timber and belonged to organizations like Western Forest Industries Association, had a tendency to say, "We've got unfair competition from the men who own lands and timber for buying government timber, because they can use capitals gains and we can't." The staff of that association used to spread that around and get these operators agitated about it. Well, the truth was anybody who bought government timber and didn't operate it right away could use the capital gains provision--if the inflation and the values of timber continued so that the price went up, if they held it, from the time they purchased the sale, before they cut the timber, they had held it six months or more--they could use capital gains just like a private land owner. Did you know that? They could, and they did. And sometimes when they were paying more for the timber than it was worth, the only profit they made was what they made on the capital gains in the operation of the government timber. So it wasn't just exclusively for private lands. It was used for any timber that was held by anybody under any circumstances if it were held for six months or more and thus could be treated as a long-term capital gain.

HKS: Explain something to me. The Forest Service puts up a block of timber at public auction. It's bid on and some company gets it, but they don't pay for it. They pay for it as they cut it. There's some initial deposits, but they don't actually own it. They haven't actually purchased it except just ahead of the logging. I'm not quite sure how they own that for six months.

WDH: Well, they do, they do. The date of the award of the sale, title passes to them in a contractual way.

HKS: I see.

WDH: But the government maintains the title to it then until it's cut and paid for, but they can use it. They can use it for the determination of capital gains. The typical government timber sale, even small sales, are for a term of two or three years, so that often people buy timber ahead. They don't buy it just for immediate cutting always.

178 They try to buy it and have an inventory bought ahead. They try to buy four or five years cut ahead all the time, so they're active. A man that is cutting on a sale that he bought three years ago is bidding on a sale today that he think he'll operate some time in the future. Of course that's one of the problems today. When they're not selling any timber, these guys log what they've got and they can't buy any more, because they're not putting it up. That's one of the major problems for the non-timber owning mills in our region right now.

Timber Sale Bailouts

HKS: Max Peterson talked about that, the so-called bailout.

WDH: He knows a lot about it of course.

HKS: He was saying that it's not quite, from the standpoint of the tax payers, as grim as it was made out, because the companies hadn't actually paid for the timber. They had sort of an option to buy.

WDH: Sure, and pay as you cut.

HKS: If they just walked away from it, there was no money to hold back.

WDH: No, except that the companies themselves had to pay, if the Forest Service determined, in the nature of liquidated damages. If, for example, the timber couldn't be sold at a price anywhere near what they had bid on it in the previous sale and the government offered it for another sale, the difference between the two could be liquidated damages. The government can go after the first buyer. Some people really got nicked on that.

HKS: So that was the relief that the feds gave them, they didn't have to pay liquidated damages. They split the difference or something.

WDH: It varied. It depended on the situation. Some places they did. Some places they had to pay liquidated damages, but perhaps not as much as they might have had to otherwise. The bailout, I think, was really kind of complicated. It was very controversial in the industry. A lot of people that never bought a lot of timber, bought some but not a lot, their attitude was "Let them eat it. They bid these outrageous prices, let them eat it. Why should we bail them out? The guy knew what the hell he was doing. He bid two hundred and sixty dollars a thousand for timber that was worth a hundred, let him eat it. Teach him a lesson."

On the other hand, the guy that had this plant with two hundred people in his employ and had been in operation for twenty-five or thirty or forty years and he was depending on this government timber and suddenly he couldn't begin to operate at the price he offered to pay, he's got the option of either going broke by doing it and laying off all these people and shutting down or he could try to work out some arrangement with the government, which they did under the bailout thing, to give him a chance to get some

179 relief on it. Now, it cost everybody some money. Everybody had to eat part of what they did. Nobody was completely bailed out in any way. Nowhere as easy as the Savings and Loan Associations. You take a company like Roseburg Lumber Company, or Roseburg Forest Products. They changed the name of it several years ago. Ken Ford, down at Roseburg and Dillard, Oregon, he probably spent two hundred million dollars. It cost him two hundred million dollars in the bailouts. That's what he had to pay for timber that he never got to operate. He really got slugged, because he was a big buyer. When the market went to hell, he probably had a billion feet of government timber under contract, a huge amount. A privately owned company, one man owns it. He has no stockholders. Kids I guess, partners with him, something like that. There're some other companies that were big purchasers that also got nicked pretty hard.

Ford's an interesting fellow. He and I were well-acquainted. I wouldn't say we're friends. I never could sell him a membership. He never supported our association, but he was the first one to get on the phone and tell me how to do it.

HKS: [laughs]

WDH: I told him that when he started paying dues and got on our board, then he'd have the right to tell me how to do it. He wanted to hire me several times. He wanted me to take a year off, because Senator Morse told him that if anybody could lick the log export problem Hagenstein's the guy who can do it. I was in Washington, D.C., and he called me at four o'clock in the morning at the Dupont Plaza Hotel. You know, he forgot the time differential. He as at work of course in his mill. He called me four o'clock in the morning eastern time and says, "I want to pay you fifty thousand for the next year and all your expenses, and I want you to come and go to work for me and take on this log export thing, because we're going to lick it, and Morse tells me you're the guy that can do it." [laughs]

HKS: Since he was primarily a purchaser of federal timber, the exports would really hurt him, because it drove the price of the logs up.

WDH: Well, he thought so, of course. He's a big exporter himself, but an exporter of chips. He's the biggest chip exporter there is in Coos Bay. He's got that big facility down there. He ships two hundred thousand tons of chips a year out of Coos Bay, Ken Ford does. He buys them from other mills and of course the chips from his own mills.

New Forestry

HKS: What's your reaction--Jerry Franklin, who won the Barrington Moore Award, and New Forestry, ancient forests and so forth.

WDH: I know him. I was sitting next to him on the rostrum at Minneapolis when he got it, because I was getting the Gifford Pinchot medal at the same time. [laughs] As a matter of fact my wife was entertained by him at the dinner table that noon. When anybody talks about New Forestry, which basically is partial cutting of a sort--no one

180 knows what sort, because anytime anybody ever talks about it, they describe it differently.

I always hark back to a talk that was made before the Puget Sound Section of the Society of American Foresters in January of 1939. I was there. I had just come back from California having been out of school for six months, been laid off in mid- November by the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine, and I was up at home looking for a job. I went to the Western Forestry meeting in December in Portland and tried to contact C. S. Chapman of Weyerhaeuser. When he'd see a kid coming toward him, he'd turn around and disappear, because he didn't have any jobs and he was too tender-hearted to tell the kids that he didn't have any jobs. So I never met C. S. Chapman. I saw him, but I never met him. But in January I was still looking around for a job, and I was about to be hired by the Eagle Logging Company as their logging engineer. I didn't know it yet. It was a blind ad, and I had written a letter in response to the blind ad. And a couple of days after what I'm about to tell you is when I was hired by them.

But I went to the SAF Puget Sound Section monthly meeting. Thornton Munger, who was then the director of the Forest Experiment Station at Portland, was the speaker. He was talking about tree selection in Douglas-fir, and told about the experience the Forest Service had had on the big 1929 timber sale that they made to Schafer Brothers Logging Company on the south end of the Olympic National Forest in the Satsop drainages. That was about a seven or eight hundred million foot timber sale, and it was made in 1929. The depression came along. They couldn't operate it, so the regional office of the Forest Service allowed Schafer Brothers to go up there and log the fir and leave all the hemlock and the white fir. And they went in there and did partial cutting and took out all the big, yellow fir and the peelers and left all the understory hemlock and the intermediates and a few codominant hemlocks behind, and the silver fir. And Munger talked about that in his talk. At the end of his talk, he said, "There's an old German forestry platitude which says 'Der Plenterwald muss nicht ein Plunderwald werden.' 'The selection forest must not become a plunder forest.'" It's a hell of a good platitude, and it applies very markedly to our region. I used to delight Thornton Munger for thirty years after that by reminding him that I had been in the audience and had heard that and cited it in German and English to him. He loved me for it.

HKS: The station published its famous--it's made more or less famous by Gordon Robinson of the Sierra Club--the Kirkland-Brandstrom study on selective logging of Douglas-fir.

WDH: "Selective Timber Management."

HKS: Yeah.

WDH: That was the title of it, published by the Charles Lathrop Pack Forestry Foundation.

HKS: In the interview that we did with Thornton Munger, long before my time, he comments on that. He saw that thing as a way of subsidizing the industry during a very

181 difficult depression by allowing them to high grade. disguised as forest management.

WDH: Exactly. He was right.

HKS: Which is what you just said.

WDH: He was right. "Der Plenterwald muss nicht ein Plunderwald werden."

HKS: How is Franklin's New Forestry different than the Kirkland-Brandstrom?

WDH: As I said earlier, everybody that I've heard including Jerry Franklin describe what he means does it differently. They carry it a little bit further in that they want to leave some standing snags and trees, and they want to leave windfalls on the ground. The guys that hear you're leaving habitat for cavity nesting birds and rodents and for the arthropods and whatever gets into the stuff on the ground. Of course in our region for years when you go into a stand of old growth timber, the first thing you do you send a windfall bucker in there, when you're going to log it, and he bucks the windfalls. Many of those windfalls are sound, and they've got good wood in them. The sapwood's gone but the heartwood is as sound as a dollar, been lying on the ground sometimes for several hundred years, and it's usable. So by taking that stuff out, when you fall the rest of the stand you minimize the breakage by doing that.

HKS: How about the fire prevention? Now this was a ritual. You got rid of the snags.

WDH: I spent forty years of my life lecturing our loggers to fall the snags, and now the government wants to leave them. I say it's wrong, because we never lost a fire in the Douglas-fir region that we could keep on the ground. We lose them when they get into the snags, because every one of them is a Roman candle that's going to set more fires. Everybody that ever fought forest fires in our region knows that if you've got snags, you're going to have a hell of a time taking care of a fire. If you've got snags, a big snag patch of any kind, it's going to burn to the end of the fuel or the end of the weather. That's what's going to happen. Man isn't going to stop it. It's going to burn to the end of the fuel or the end of the weather just like it did in the Tillamook fire. What stopped the Tillamook fires was not man, it was a change in the weather.

HKS: Sure. On this end of the country we don't hear much about New Forestry. Do they address the fire control issue?

WDH: Oh, no. No one talks about that anymore. Fire they say is a tool that we've got to use more of. In eastern Oregon you've got these fellows saying that we've got to go through there and do light burning there all the time, like some places in other parts, some places in the South. You know, get rid of the accumulation of pine straw if it continues to be a fire hazard. I guess there's nothing wrong with that if you can handle it right, but the thing is that too much controlled burning that I've seen in my life gets out of control. When it gets out of control, it does damage that we don't want. I think fire is a useful tool. I think that we still have to burn some slash. For example, in our region where you've got a heavy accumulation of slash particularly in the logging of old

182 growth timber, because you've got so much debris on the ground to begin with because of all the windfalls and all the rotten material and you need to get rid of it to reduce the fire hazard in the first place, and secondly to prepare a good situation for reforestation. If you've got the land occupied by a bunch of rotten windfalls every place, you're not going to be able to plant much. You're going to have inadequate stocking, because you're not going to be able to plant very much of it. You get a four or five hundred year old stand, you might have about 20 percent of the ground covered. It's covered by windfalls before you ever go in there.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: You know, you've been through it. You were raised out there. You know exactly what it's like. Jerry's riding the crest of the biodiversity, New Forestry wave, and he'll have fun doing it. But he's not doing the forestry of the future a good turn, because we're just taking a lot of land out of production is what we're doing. The only way in the world in the long pull that a country that is still increasing in population can justify having a lot of land not being used, wilderness for example, not being used other than for recreation or study purposes, is to have those lands that are left for productivity producing as good a level as the economy and our knowledge will allow us. Many times in the wilderness hearings I used that argument that we've got to protect against insects and fire in lands adjacent to wilderness areas. One of the detriments of wilderness is that you've got areas where insects can build up, because you're not going to do anything about it. And the fires can build up. Nature will set the fires, and they'll go out of the wilderness area into the areas we want to use for production. How can we protect them adequately when we can't go in there with mechanical means to take care of a fire in a wilderness area.

We talked a little bit about the wilderness legislation earlier, and one point that I should have made but I didn't, because I talked mostly about my experiences, sad some of them were, with Anderson. On the House side, the chairman of the Interior Committee was Congressman Wayne Aspinall of Colorado. A lot of people don't know this, but Aspinall started out in his political career in the Colorado legislature as a Republican, and by the time he got to Congress he was a Democrat. I asked him once, when he told me he'd been a Republic legislator, "How come?" He said, "My party in Colorado walked away from me, and I had to change parties to accomplish some of the constructive things that I thought needed to be done for the state. Once I got here and began to get a little seniority, I didn't dare go back to be a Republican, because I can see that one day I might be the chairman of a significant committee," and of course he became chairman of the Interior Committee. And he participated in the wilderness hearings.

One of the reasons why the Wilderness Bill took so long to get through the Congress, seven years, was because he held it there. He held it there, because he was trying honestly to make a decent piece of legislation out of it by helping us get the hoops in it through which the candidate areas would have to jump in order to one day be justified and left as wilderness. One of the hearings was conducted by Gracie Pfost, who was a congresswoman from Idaho. She was the chairman of the subcommittee on Public Lands for four years maybe. She had held some field hearings, but this was one in

183 Washington, D.C., and I was a witness. Clepper was a witness for SAF by the way, just before me. He did a good job. Aspinall sat there as the ex-officio member of the subcommittee and chairman of the full committee right next to Mrs. Pfost. He let her run the hearing, but he would say, "Madam Chairman, Madam Chairman." (I guess they'd call them chairperson today. "Madam Chairman." That's kind of a conflict of terms, isn't it--Madam and Chair Man?) "May I ask a question?" He was very courteous to her. He deferred to her. "Why certainly, Mr. Chairman," she says. He says "Hagenstein, you've been talking about your experience on the Pete King fire in the Selway National Forest in Idaho in 1934. In fact you've been back there since, and the government's never done anything to reclaim the land. Last summer we had some bad fires there, and they were reluctant to take mechanical equipment in there. It cost them a fortune when they finally went in there to try to put that fire out. If you were in charge of a thing like that, what would you do?" I says, "Mr. Chairman, I'd fight it with everything we had. The law should allow them to use mechanical equipment if that's the only way they can stop the fire. You know, it may just be a wilderness area to some people, but it's somebody's watershed, and watersheds should be protected, because those watersheds are important to the people who live down below." "Thank you," he says, "I was hoping that's what you would say." [chuckles]

HKS: The Organic Act. National forests were set aside for watershed.

WDH: Water and timber, you bet. You know, that phrase "No forest reservation shall be established except to protect the water flows, and to provide an adequate supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States." You couldn't improve one word in that, the way that's written, for what are and should be continuously the purposes of our great National Forest System.

HKS: Is there more you'd like to say on the issue of clearcutting?

WDH: I would think that it's going to continue to be a political problem, because the anti-forestry forces are going to continue to take the kind of pictures they do of the stumps and the logging debris and imply to people that this is the way the whole country's going to look if we continue to practice forestry in the national forests and other public lands. And they're going to try to legislate against clearcutting. They're going to try to prohibit it by law.

HKS: Dave Scott, my silviculture prof at the University of Washington, kept advocating for second-growth Douglas-fir, that shelterwood would work. He wasn't advocating it as a solution to the clearcut problem. He thought it was a superior management tool.

WDH: It may work in some areas, but clearcutting is better. If you're really going to use the productivity of the land.

HKS: And that terrain is pretty steep for it.

WDH: You know, I saw a lot of shelterwood, as a member of the West German forestry study team that was sent there by the Forest Service in 1974, and of course

184 talked with a lot of the German foresters. We visited all the significant forests in the whole country of West Germany, and rode around with all these foresters. And most of these German foresters are pretty conversant with English. And we had the great advantage in that Doctor Dietrich Mulder, who was the immediate retired dean of the faculty of forestry at the University of Gőttigen, was our guide. He had been at the University of California as an exchange professor for six or seven years, and he is a silviculturist. He had had the local foresters, every place we visited, prepare what he called a "guide." They prepared it in German, but it was all translated into English for the Americans. This gave us the history of the forest we were going to visit, the soil types that were underlaying the forest, the species composition, what the productivity of the land was in terms of cubic meters per hectare per year, what the harvest had been in the previous ten years from the land, cultural treatments that had been given to it, the details of the reforestation, the class of stock, what it cost to do all these things, what the taxes were because it was mostly private land, and everything else that was pertinent to it. You never saw such a preparation in your life for a field trip. It was the best field trip I was ever on in my life. We had twenty-three days of this thing, one day after another. We saw lots of shelterwood, and we saw lots of clearcutting. We saw mostly good forestry.

We saw a few places where it wasn't as good as it could have been. We saw lots of salvage, because they had had a terrible blowdown two years before in 1972 before we were there. They were still salvaging it, because they didn't have enough loggers for one thing. They imported loggers from Sweden, believe it or not, to contract logging for the salvage, the German foresters did. They brought lots. There were five or six hundred Swedish loggers, men, that came down there, brought their own equipment from Sweden to salvage. The government subsidized the salvage in this respect that in the case of Scotch pine, it blue stains badly. The sapwood does just like southern pine does. You don't leave it to lie around over a couple of summers. It's all going to be blue stained. So they had these great cold decks, decks of logs, every place in the country. They hadn't been able to use them all yet. They had sprinkler systems on them trying to keep them wet just like when you go to Ken Ford's mill in Dillard, Oregon, where he's got these big sprinklers over these big decks of logs.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: But we never saw any Scotch pine being used in construction in Germany that wasn't blue stained, not a bit, as a result of it, because they couldn't begin to use it there was so much of it. They had seven billion feet of timber blowdown in that one storm in '72. Seven billion feet in West Germany with only eighteen million acres of forest land, but it's one hell of a lot of timber. You know, the logs are relatively small, but all this timber may be up to a hundred and forty years old. But shelterwood's got lots of problems with it, one of which is that if you're in an area that is subject to severe windstorms, you lose a lot of it. It ends up as a clearcut, so instead of fussing around with it why not clearcut in the first place and then go in there and get the land back into production? That's one of the big arguments against it. Makes it look nice. The Forest Service is trying a lot of it in Mount Hood National Forest for example. I've seen some of it.

185 Meeting Gifford Pinchot

HKS: You're looking at a photograph and a pamphlet I wrote for the Forest Service on the origin of the national forests.

WDH: There's a picture in here of G. P. at work in 1898, the year he was appointed the chief of the Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture, with his handlebar moustache that he wore most of his life. In 1940, when I was a student at Duke University, I went to my first SAF national meeting. I was a member of the Society since 1938. I went to the meeting, which was held in Washington, D.C., as was the custom of the Society on the decennial years to hold the meeting there 1940, '50, '60 and so on, and I guess it still is, because in 1990 it was held in Washington, D.C. It was in the Mayflower Hotel. The morning of the first meeting I think of the general session I happened to sit next to Mr. Pinchot. I introduced myself to him. I recognized him of course having seen his pictures many times. Then he invited me to have lunch with him, so I had lunch with him at his home on Rhode Island Avenue where he lived. The house is no longer there. It's a Holiday Inn that's there now. We got into a hell of an argument about regulation. [both laugh]

HKS: Tell me about Pinchot the man when you were with him, his personality.

WDH: Charming, charming man.

HKS: I mean, he obviously had charisma. People worshipped him.

WDH: Oh, yes. He was a charmer, no question to it.

HKS: What was his presence like? Did he have a deep voice?

WDH: His voice, I wouldn't say it was deep or it was high pitched. It was a normal, what I would think of as a normal voice. He was very articulate and would continue chewing his food before he would speak when he had a mouthful of food, which I wasn't always good at. I've sometimes talked with my mouth half full. I was impressed also by the fact that we were exactly the same height. We looked eye to eye. He was six feet four. Very slim, he was a very slim, trim man. He had these big, fierce mustaches, you know, kind of handlebar moustache type thing. It was an interesting experience to meet him. I was twenty-five years old. He was three times that old. He was seventy- five.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: That was the first society national meeting I ever attended. The next one was in 1946 at Salt Lake City. And thereafter, except for two or three, I've attended every single one. I've been to about forty-five meetings in my life.

HKS: My goodness.

186 WDH: At those meetings I had the privilege of meeting all the other founding members of the society with the exception of the one who was dead before I was born. The only man that was one of the seven founders of our society that I never had a chance to meet and talk with personally was Overton Price. All the rest of them I had the privilege of knowing: William (Billy) Hall, Professor Ralph Hosmer from Cornell-. As a matter of fact, when George Drake was president in 1952, the meeting was a joint meeting with our Canadian cousins at Montreal. Professor Hosmer and the Drakes and my wife and I went from Montreal to Boston on the train together. We were all in the same parlor car, and we had a good visit with him. I never knew it until then, but Professor Hosmer had a terrible speech impediment. He stuttered. He'd have to hesitate and have to "t-t-t-t" a little bit to get started on a word. But he was an engaging guy. Before I saw him, I had visited the trees that he had planted on the Island of Maui, and I was able to talk to him about that. He was very much interested in the fact that I had been there and seen these trees that he had planted. You know, he was the territorial forester of Hawaii.

HKS: That's right.

WDH: I met Tommy Sherrard. He had a funny title. He was an assistant to the assistant regional forester in Portland. When I worked in the Forest Service in the summer of 1937, I met him. I was in charge of the pine beetle survey in the Ochoco National Forest that summer. It was a summer job. Recently I had the interesting experience of meeting Tommy Sherrard's son. About September 1991, that'd be a year ago last month, the Forest Service and the Keep Oregon Green Association had a dedication ceremony of a boulder at the Eagle Creek campground on the Mount Hood National Forest, dedicating a boulder as a memorial to Albert Wiesendanger, who was a pioneer forest ranger in that district and who for thirty-two years was the executive director of Keep Oregon Green Association. I was the dedication speaker. When I got through talking, why, a man of about sixty years of age with a full beard came up and said, "You mentioned my father in your talk, and I just want to tell you that I'm Sherrard. You mentioned my father, Tommy Sherrard." Sherrard had been the supervisor of the Mount Hood National Forest at one time, but he ended up retired from the regional office.

And then of course E. T. Allen. E. T. Allen who was one of the first forest rangers in the Northwest. He was hired as a forest ranger in 1898 on what was called the Washington National Forest in those days, which later became partly the Snoqualmie and partly the Gifford Pinchot. He was also the first state forester of California and the first regional forester, when they called them district forester, of the regional office of the Forest Service in Portland in the days when Region 6 included Alaska as well as Washington and Oregon. I knew him, of course, when I began to go to the Western Forestry and Conservation Association meetings, the first one of which I went to was in 1938 where I met him and several years there after until he passed away. So with Pinchot and Sherrard and Hall and Hosmer. I met Dean Graves at the society meeting in Washington, D.C., in 1940 also. He was there. You know, he was the former chief of the Forest Service. So I met them all! I met every single one of them that were alive in my time. Now that's pretty interesting for a kid that was born fifteen years after the society was founded, and who didn't become a forester until the society was thirty-eight years old.

187 HKS: One thing that it shows is that forestry was very young.

WDH: You bet, absolutely.

HKS: All the people were very young.

WDH: Pinchot, when he became the chief he was only-. Let's see, he was born in 1865, so in 1905 he was only forty years old.

HKS: That's right.

WDH: And Colonel Greeley became chief in 1920. The Colonel was born in 1879. He was forty-one years of age. Colonel Greeley, by the way, was the president of the Society the year I was born, 1915. Had he lived to see me president, he would have been proud as hell of me.

Reorganization

HKS: I'm sure he would've. You've been talking about the Forest Service, so that leads into another topic. It's the on-going discussion of reorganization of federal resource agencies to have some kind of continuity of federal policy toward the land. In the abstract, do you favor that? Assuming it could be done.

WDH: I think you could make the case for it. You could make the case for it that it'd be more efficient and all that, but politically I don't think it's attainable. I think there are so many competing interests for the use of the resources on the public lands that you're continually going to have champions that represent constituents that feel strongly one way or another on this, and they're going to keep the thing in turmoil, and nothing's ever going to happen. Way back in the Hoover commission, there was made a recommendation for a Department of Natural Resources or Department of Conservation or something. Then thereafter when Ickes tried to get the Forest Service, when he and Wallace were having their big struggle during the '30s. Then later in Carter's time, when Andrus was secretary of the interior, he tried it.

By the way, I didn't tell you before when I talked about this a little bit, we had a NFPA forestry committee meeting, and their board met with Andrus down in Boca Raton, Florida, at the time of the annual meeting of the Association. I was given the dirty job at the meeting to tell him what we really thought about it. [chuckles]

HKS: Both Nixon--and he came about as close as any--and Carter wanted to reorganize. Was there an opportunity for you to testify publicly? Were there actually bills?

WDH: No, no, never. Never testified publicly on the subject. Made speeches about it to groups and all that sort of thing. We talked about it internally. I talked to individual members of the Congress about it that were on the committees. I talked to Aspinall

188 about it a few times. Aspinall, when they had the Public Land Law Review Commission of which he was also the chairman-. My cousin, Perry, worked for him there.

HKS: That's right.

WDH: He was one of the staff members that worked with Milton Pearl. I worked very closely with that commission on a lot of things. Aspinall and I were good personal friends. I thought a lot of him, and I think he of me. So he thought that with my connections with a lot of people that counted in public policy matters that I could be helpful to them, and I was. Publicly once when we were testifying on something, why, he took time out of the hearing and put on the record that I had been one of the young men in the country that had helped very markedly in the affairs of the Public Land Law Review Commission, and he wanted to express his thanks for it. You know, it isn't often that you get a gratuitous accolade like that in the midst of a hearing on something else. But that's the kind of a guy he was. He was nice. He was also ornery. [laughs] He had an ornery streak in him, and he was tough on witnesses once in a while. He never was with me. He was always nice to me.

HKS: In all your years in Oregon, where you observed first-hand BLM forest management, with different policies, different paybacks to counties. What was your feeling about that? Was that just the way it was?

WDH: My feeling of course was that it was important that the split of the plunder to the counties from the O&C lands be maintained, because those lands had all been on the tax rolls at one time. When the land grant had been made to the Oregon and California Railroad Company, predecessor of the Southern Pacific, and prior to the time when the government litigated and then finally legislated to revest the lands, because the railroad company had been guilty of violating many of the terms of the grant.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: The grant would only allow the land to be sold in parcels of a hundred and sixty acres to a bona fide settler at no less than a dollar and a quarter, nor more than two dollars and a half per acre. They sold and eight and ten thousand acres in one chunk at nine dollars an acre to timber companies and others, so the government had them dead to rights for violating the terms of the grant, and that's how the government was able to revest the property. The counties in the developing areas, the population increasingly depended on taxation of these lands largely until you got some industries developed and a lot of home ownership and all that, these rural lands were the principal source of support for maintaining county government, so you could have schools and roads and so on. So it was very important. It was subject of course to political piracy, or political invasion, or political buccaneering, at any time by all the other counties in the United States, because there's a thousand public land counties in the United States. And these eighteen counties under the O&C Act were entitled to 75 percent of the receipts, and the government only got 25 percent for managing the lands. All the national forest counties only got 25 percent plus 10 percent additional for the Road and Trail Fund that could be spent within the county. A county that was sitting outside the O&C belt would look at it and say, "Geez, these guys are getting 75 percent of the receipts. We're only getting 25

189 plus the 10 for Roads and Trails. How come?" So it was a controversial thing even within the state because the counties outside the eighteen O&C counties looked at them enviously. Well, it was continually under attack in the Congress, and of course all that saved it for years and years was the fact that Senator McNary was there.

When McNary died in 1944, Governor Snell who had been a close associate of Guy Cordon, who was then a practicing attorney who represented the O&C counties, appointed Cordon in McNary's seat. Cordon served for ten years in the Senate. In 1944 he was appointed. I don't know whether he had to run for the unexpired term in the '46 election. He probably did and was elected. He was re-elected in 1948 to a six-year term. So he served ten years in the Senate. And Cordon, of course, having been the attorney for the O&C counties, was the principal author of the O&C Act of 1937. He was the principal draftsman of it, along with some help from a lumberman by the name of George Gerlinger of Willamette Valley Lumber Company and Warren Tilton who was the man who hired me to work for the West Coast Lumbermen's Association and two or three others including Dave Mason who was a consulting forester who worked very closely with the O&C counties. They were the men that really got the O&C Act, put it together and got it enacted. Of course, Guy Cordon was the principal defender of it in the Congress. Let me say "protector" of it, not "defender." Protector.

HKS: How about the quality of land management? Is forestry on national forest lands practiced on a different level of sophistication than that of the BLM?

WDH: It was for a while, but it hasn't been of recent years. Of recent years they're comparable.

HKS: So when you're driving across the country you can't say "This must be BLM, this is Forest Service-"

WDH: No, no.

HKS: Okay.

WDH: They both do as good a job as the conditions will allow them to do. They've both been increasing and intensifying their forestry right along for a long time.

I want to go back. One thing though on the O&C, the split of the plunder. With all the-. [drops his voice] I shouldn't call it "the split of the plunder." I should call it "their share of the receipts." [laughs]

HKS: That's right.

WDH: I'm being a little bit hooktenderish when I talk that way, a little Grays Harbor coming out in me. But about 1951 or '2 the counties around the country that were national forest counties were wanting to whittle down the O&C amount or raise theirs. The chance of raising theirs was slim, but the chance of bringing down the O&C was likely. It wasn't good, but it was likely. So Guy Cordon took the initiative, and he wanted me to help him on it. I was in Eugene, and he called our office in Portland and

190 found out I was in Eugene. He called me and talked to me there. He said, "Give me the framework of what we ought to have, just the framework of what you think we ought to have in modifying the share of the receipts that go to the O&C counties, in such a way that we can preserve the part that we give up if we give up any of it, so that we can get an automatic appropriation to the BLM to use those funds for management, so that we don't have to continually fight for appropriations. With respect to the level of the receipts, we'd have some kind of a level that would go for that." So I wrote the longest telegram I ever wrote in my life. I wrote a telegram of about two thousand words. Of course I sent it as a night letter, because the cost would have been exorbitant if I'd sent it as a day letter. I had to go and print the damn thing by hand. I didn't have any facilities there in our office. We had a girl there and there was a typewriter, but the girl was gone and this was urgent, because Guy wanted it right now. And when Guy Cordon cracked the whip on me, I always responded, because nobody ever worked harder for forestry in the United States Senate than Guy Cordon of Oregon. He was a knowledgeable guy.

For nearly ten years I was his principal forestry adviser. For ten years I had a great relationship and great experience with that wonderful man. [pause] I don't have a copy of that telegram. I never kept one, because I had no way of making one. I sat in the telegraph office on a high stool with these little forms that had about eight or nine lines on them, and I printed all that thing out by hand. I did sheet after sheet after sheet after sheet. And there was no carbon paper. I couldn't make a carbon. I would love to have a copy of that telegram. It was one of the best telegrams I ever wrote. We cut the receipts of the counties down to 50 percent, and we took the 25 percent that they were giving up and that would go as an appropriation to the BLM for the management of the lands. And he was able to get that through. Today the split of the plunder is 50 percent to the counties, 25 percent is allocated to the BLM, although the Appropriation Committees have to approve it each year in whatever budget request they make. Then the other 25 percent is covered into the Treasury as a miscellaneous receipt. That's the way it is, and Guy Cordon got that. He did that with the idea that we were going to improve the forestry on the lands and were going to save still a major share of the receipts for the counties because they depend on it.

We have significant receipts in BLM counties in western Oregon to where there are some counties like Jackson County, Medford's the county seat; Douglas County, Roseburg's the county seat, that haven't had a county levy on private property to run county government for thirty years. The counties' share of O&C and national forest receipts have covered it. That's terrific. But it's in recognition of the fact that when those lands were either created as national forests or the lands of the O&C were revested by the government and taken off the tax rolls, they were forever precluded from ever contributing to the tax base. So if you're going to have a county government that's going to maintain a system of roads so people can get to and from and schools so the kids will get educations, you're going to have to have some resources to do it. In many of those counties in western Oregon, except for the metropolitan counties up near the mouth of the Willamette like Clackamas and Multnomah, many of the rest of those counties are 70 percent public land.

HKS: I know.

191 WDH: You know how they are, they've got O&C lands plus the national forest, so it's a damn tough thing. As population has grown there and the need for more roads and more schools and more facilities of all kinds have come about, those counties have been hard pressed. So Guy Cordon was an able protector of the counties' rights and the counties' privileges in respect to the O&C lands. Never had a senator that good since. I mean, Cordon was succeeded, of course, by Neuberger. Neuberger wasn't interested in that, and of course Neuberger didn't last very long. He only served one term, part of a term. He died in office. His wife served a full term. She was a complete waste of time. I mean, Mrs. Neuberger's a nice girl and all that sort of thing, but do you know who she hired for administrative assistant?

HKS: No.

WDH: Lloyd Tupling, for god's sake, who spent the rest of his work life after she left the Senate working for the Sierra Club.

HKS: The name is familiar somehow.

WDH: Well, he was a newspaperman. He worked for the Oregon Journal, I think, in Portland.

Forest Practice Acts and Regulation

HKS: Let's look at state forest practice acts. During the '70s EPA proposed federal standards for state forest practice acts under the rationale of uniform water quality. It didn't get very far, but it was played up in the Journal of Forestry and it was debated. To my knowledge that's the only serious effort, unless you go back to the regulation days, of having federal standards. You have a problem with that, in the abstract?

WDH: Federal standards are like anything else that you do at a federal level. When you get down to all the local situations, because of their great variability, it creates automatic conflicts with people all the time. You wouldn't get things done anywhere near as efficiently as if you tried to do it on a state level. Any regulation of land activities, with the exception of things that are involved clearly in interstate like a river that flows through a number of states or something like that, really is better done by the states than it is by the federal government. The federal government has too god damned many levels of administration, and by the time you get down to the guy that's the inspector or regulator on the ground, why he's so boxed in by rules and regulations of one sort or another that come down from the higher echelons that he gives up and just fools around with this stuff. He doesn't do as good a job as he wants to, or he can't. Circumstances don't allow him. He's handcuffed, hog-tied, straight-jacketed. It's impossible.

One thing that I wanted to tell you, and it isn't related directly to what we're talking about now, but indirectly it is. When I was a student here in Durham at the Duke School of Forestry as it was called then, Dick McArdle was the director of the Southeastern Forest Experiment Station at Asheville. I was the vice-president of the forestry club at

192 Duke, elected by my handful of classmates. The vice-president didn't do very much except I was also the program chairman, so I invited the speakers. We had a meeting once a month. So I invited McArdle, whom I knew slightly, to come down to us and talk to us about new developments in forestry research. A lot of the kids who were studying with me at the time were interested in going into experiment station work, so I thought it would be good to have a director come down and talk to these fellows, tell them a little about what was going on, give them some indication of what the opportunities were in that field in case they got into it. I talked to Dr. Korstian about it, who was the dean. And Korstian, when I told him about the fellow I'd like to invite, he said, "Yeah. That would be a good idea." He approved of it. So I invited McArdle.

McArdle talked about twenty minutes about what was going on in forestry research. Then he spent the rest of the time making the pitch for regulation of private forestry by federal law. The bait he held out for support from these kids, you know the average student there wasn't as old or wasn't as experienced as I, the bait he held out was that we would have to have a forester to administer the federal regulation in every forested county in the United States of which there were about two thousand. So he said there'd be two thousand new forestry jobs created. That's the bait he held out. And when he was all through, I got up and thanked him, and then I took him on. I damn near got run out of school, because Korstian said that I wasn't very polite to Dick McArdle. [chuckles] Korstian was mad as hell at me for that. Korstian hardly talked to me for a month as a result of that. He really wrestled me down for it.

Years later when McArdle was first chief in the summer of 1953, I went to see him. And I didn't talk to our board about this. On my own I decided that it would be a good thing to go and sit down and talk to McArdle and say, "Look, I've come and I've brought the olive branch, and the olive branch is that we ought to quit arguing about the regulation issue and get down to cases of what we in the industry can do to help you get the tools to do the kind of a job the national forests need to start doing, because the time is ripe for their participation in meeting the needs of the people for the things they can furnish." He was very receptive to it. I was feeling a little bit guilty that maybe I had been too rough on him way back, you know, in the spring of 1941 when I was here and invited him to come down and Korstian dressed me down for it, so I mentioned that. "Oh hell," he says, "you did the right thing. I was just doing what I was required to do, the directors and the regional foresters. We were all charged in those days with carrying the regulation torch. Think nothing of it." He was generous about it.

HKS: He was a very nice man.

WDH: Yes, he was. He and I had our friendly conversation there, and he agreed with me. He said, "You're right. It is time for us to not fool around with this stuff. We ought to get back to the problems that we really have and solve them and get on with some progress in what we need to do. I know of your interest in the road thing, and we greatly appreciate what you're doing to help us on that, because without roads we can't do it. I know that. Everybody in the Service knows it, even the guys that are promoting regulation." And then he invited a fellow by the name of Earl Loveridge in. I don't know what Loveridge's job was. He was an assistant chief I think kind of in charge of administration. Loveridge and I got into a fight right in McArdle's office, just the three

193 of us there. McArdle just sat there and laughed the whole time. Loveridge made some remark about something and we got into a god damned Donnybrook. We really did. It was a hell of an argument. So I realized that that wasn't helping what I had come there to do, so I finally got up and got the hell out of there and bid him good-bye and thanked him for visiting with me and beat it. I never saw Loveridge again, but I saw McArdle a number of times of course.

Endangered Species and Biodiversity

HKS: One more question on the list here. Endangered Species. You've got a pamphlet here, right?

WDH: [laughs] I don't know that I have. I got a kick out of you yesterday, Pete, when I reached over for something and you said, "You've got one on everything." [laughs] I was a hell of prolific writer and speaker for a good many years as you know. I don't think I ever addressed an article of any kind on the Endangered Species Act.

HKS: What do you think the chances would be of modifying the law some way in the future?

WDH: It needs modification to pay some attention to people. Of course everybody says, "It's the economic issues that are all you're interested there," but economics immediately becomes a social thing. The best articulation of what's happened because of the owl that's been made by anyone in the Northwest in the last five years is being made by this young sociological forester by the name of Bob Lee at the University of Washington. That guy has gone out and studied this stuff, and he's articulate about it, and he writes well about it, and he's told them the problem they've got. If anybody in the Congress who's interested in modifying the Endangered Species Act doesn't use him as a principal witness to make the case for people in this instance, they're making one capital mistake, I'll tell you that. He's really good. I don't know him too well. I met him when we were both members of the official American delegation to the World Forestry Congress at Jakarta in 1978. Of course I've seen him since at some things at the University of Washington and the SAF meetings, because he's invited frequently to speak particularly since his interest in this subject out there, because of the owl. The Endangered Species Act is another thing that's allowing anti-forestry forces to perpetuate the fraud that's being perpetrated upon the people of the West.

HKS: Do you think that the predictions of job loss are basically accurate? I've read that two thousand Forest Service employees in Region 6 will lose their job ultimately, because of the down-sizing of timber management activities.

WDH: If you don't practice forestry on the productive lands in the national forests, you can't justify keeping people on the job that are set up to do it. I think that there is a good chance there may be two thousand less jobs in the Forest Service. I think that if the Congress is not going to allow the practice of forestry because of policy legislation or regulations that are promulgated thereunder on the national forests, I think the same Congress that does that has the moral obligation to the public to cut the costs of running

194 the national forests, because otherwise you're spending money on things that no one is doing anything with. The same thing goes for research. What's the point of continuing to spend the amount of money we've been spending on research in the experiment stations if we're not going to use the results of the research to improve the forestry in the national forests and throughout the country generally? Forest Service research has been beneficial as hell to private forestry, because a lot of the basic stuff that we learned that improved our practices came out of that research.

HKS: Right.

WDH: I was always a great supporter for the research. I was a member of the advisory committee of the Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station when they called it that, from the time it was first organized until the secretary of agriculture did away with it. I was on it for what, twenty-five years? And I was always an active member. I not only went to the meetings, I asked lots of questions, I studied the programs, and I went before the Appropriations Committee and helped them every time they needed it there for a long, long time.

I've got to tell you a funny story. The chairman of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee in the House is a lawyer from Chicago by the name of Sidney Yates. He's man of about oh, probably seventy-five years old now. He doesn't know much about forestry, not much interested in it really. One time when I was appearing before him, he said (he was always tough on witnesses), "Don't take much time." "Highlight your statement" sort of thing. So you never had a very long statement for him anyway. You'd generally have three or four pages. I had a lot of statistical stuff, and the statistics that I had with me were the keys for something. I said, "Mr. Chairman, I'd just like to highlight my points. I want to talk about reforestation, about salvage logging, about insect control, and research." "Thank you very much," he says. "Next witness please." [both laugh] He laughed. I had that pulled on me twice. Judge Rarick did the same thing in the tussock moth thing when I was there for the Northwest Forest Pest Action Council. He says, "Are you against the tussock moth?" I said, "Indeed I am, Sir." He said, "Next witness, please." [both laugh]

My wife and I were visiting the National Gallery of Art. There was some exhibit she wanted to see, and we were there. This would be about 1978. I don't know why we were in Washington, but she was still on the National Commission on the Education of Disadvantaged Children. I guess she was there for a meeting and I was there. We happened to be there together. We had a day off, so she wanted to go see this art exhibit, and we went over there. And here's Yates in there in the tow of a couple of the guys from the museum, because his Interior Appropriation Subcommittee also appropriated money for those museums as well as for the Forest Service and BLM. So these two guys had him. I saw him and went over. Yates is a man about, oh about six feet one or two, pretty tall for a city lawyer. I went over and put my arm around him, hugged him up, and I said, "Well, Mr. Chairman , how is everything today." And he turned around and said, "Jesus Christ, you're not going to lobby me on reforestation in here, are you?" [both laugh] There was a big crowd of people in there. Everybody laughed like hell. These two guys that had him in tow were mad as hell at me coming up and interfering, because they were giving him the business. [laughs]

195

HKS: Sure.

WDH: "Don't Sell the Land"?

HKS: Yes.

WDH: Please, read this one.

HKS: I'll do that.

WDH: This is the one I sent to every chairman and every president of every major land-owning company in the country. That resulted from my experience with Creson. That's where I got the idea to write it.

HKS: Back when the National Forest Management Act was going through, it had language on biodiversity. Were there any alarms that went off? Did anyone say, "This is going to cause us problems down the road"? Did anyone anticipate this? Were these issue controversial? That aspect of it.

WDH: I don't really think we even discussed it in the industry very much. There may have been a few people who did, but I don't remember any concerted effort by an association to do anything about it. NFPA may have, but I don't recall. I think that people probably reacted to it this way that "oh, what the hell! This isn't going to have any effect on anything significant." This is a plaything for a bunch of bureaucrats. Let them do it.

HKS: We'll save the grizzly bear and the wolf and everything else.

WDH: Sure. Everybody knows that there is a great deal of sympathy on the part of all human beings for the furred and the feathered folk of the forest. It's just inherent. Everybody loves birds. Everybody likes to go to the zoo and see the animals, although a lot of people think they shouldn't be in zoos. A lot of people think they should be left in the wild. Everybody likes all animals until the animals become a nuisance or a pest or damage them in some way. Stockmen, or outdoors people, they like animals but they don't like animals taking their flocks. They don't like animals being predators on their stock. I don't like raccoons coming up and crapping on my front porch in Portland, which they do frequently. I have to go out and clean it up. They pee a lot on the corners of the house and all that sort of thing. We've got a deck around our house, and the coons are up there all the time. We live on the edge of the woods, even though we're in town. There's a half mile of woods right in front of our house down to the next street, and we're only nine minutes from downtown. Where I live, nine minutes from downtown, there's skunks, coons, possums, squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits. I once saw a coyote. I've never seen any deer tracks. But recently we've had a bear that's been in there. Not too long ago the Game Commission had to come and tranquilize an elk that was down on Terwilliger Boulevard, which is at the bottom of the hill where we live.

HKS: An elk.

196

WDH: It was a big cow elk, a big one, about a thousand pounds.

HKS: That's amazing.

WDH: So, you've got a lot of public sympathy for it, and anybody says, "By god, that species is endangered," you know, we're going to do something about it.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: If it means stopping the whole world otherwise, why they're going to do it. I don't know any congressman who's got guts enough to stand up and say, "We've got to repeal the Endangered Species Act." And I don't know very many that are willing to say that we need to modify it. Packwood's saying that now in his re-election campaign, because he's in a tough re-election campaign, and he thinks in our state that's going to get him more votes, and I don't know whether it will or not. When you take an urban population like the five hundred thousand people or six hundred thousand or whatever that live in the metropolitan area of Portland which includes Vancouver, Washington, and all the towns around there, about three or four counties all together. The average kid that's in there doesn't realize that forestry's important to the economy of his family, because he's protected from it. He's removed from it. He's insulated against it. Today the average kid that is educated in a city school thinks that food comes from the Safeway store, gasoline comes from the service station. They don't associate things with their sources anymore. I blame the public school system for that. And the environmentalists have done a hell of a good job of getting into the public school system with all their materials.

HKS: Well, AFI, AFC, whatever it's called these days, has been doing a pretty good job, too, through Project Learning Tree.

WDH: They've had a lot of constructive things, but not enough in comparison to the other side. You compare the amount of money that has been devoted to the development of telling the story, education of youngsters, by our industry as compared with the anti-forestry forces, and it's nothing. It's nothing by comparison. Did you know that Jordan has written a book? Did Dick Jordan talk to you about that?

HKS: As a matter of fact he was here doing some research.

WDH: He's got a whole manuscript, and he sent it to four people. He sent it to Art Greeley, because he wanted to get some reaction to Forest Service stuff from him. He sent it to me. I read the whole thing, commented on it, wrote him a critique of it. It's very interesting. He's exposing this whole anti-forestry movement for what it is. It's too long. It needs a lot of briefing down. he's repetitious in it, partly for emphasis. But you're not going to hold a reader very long with it. It's too much. And he's given it now to Charles Twining. Chuck Twining is now looking it over for him for editorial help. Dick's got it. It's all there. He did a hell of a job of research on it. And he's got a potential publisher. He's got this publishing outfit called Regnery. They're in

197 Washington, D.C. They just published, and it's a best seller, a book by Dixie Lee Ray, the former governor of Washington. Do you know about her book?

HKS: Yes, I do.

WDH: It takes on the environmental system, or the environmental business, pretty heavily. She did that when she was governor of the state, but they beat her when she ran for re-election. I haven't read the book. He wants me to buy one and read it, and I will, but I just haven't been ready to do it since he visited.

He and I have done some work together. We had a joint client on a thing or two. I got acquainted with him when he used to read this column of mine, "Woodn't You Know?" He called me up and asked me a question. I didn't know him before that. He called me up from Montclair, New Jersey. Then he came to see me. We've been good friends ever since. We've been to New York together. We've been up to Mount St. Helens together. We went to Montclair four years ago, also went to Grey Towers by the way on that trip in '88 and got to see the house. It was closed to the public. I told the girl that I had known Mr. Pinchot and had been awarded the Gifford Pinchot medal, and I said I just had to come see the place. The Forest Service and the Soil Conservation Service had a meeting going on. The girl tracked the manager down, and he said, "They're going to have lunch. Go down and visit Kill Devil Falls and come back here at noon, and I'll take you through." So he took us up to Pinchot's bedroom and the whole works. We got to see the whole thing. And the library.

Looking Back at Regrets

HKS: Let's sum up with the standard two questions. Looking back, what were the failures? What are your regrets?

WDH: We made such remarkable progress in our region in my lifetime in private forestry on the industrial tree farms. In the 1950s we began to get the public lands marching toward the same thing significantly, and by the mid-'60s they were doing a wonderful job. My only regret is that all of a sudden the anti-forestry forces came into the leadership roles that they have adopted for themselves and they scared the hell out of everybody and they slowed up all the great advances that were made on the public lands to where it even looks as though they're going to stop.

HKS: Why do you think they were so successful?

WDH: They weren't hampered by the need to tell the truth, for one thing. They were able to scare the hell out of the people that would put up money to finance them, and they were able to get the money and lots of it. To their credit, they were zealous in their beliefs, and they prosecuted their programs so vigorously that they just ran over everybody else. They ran over the bureaucrats. They ran over the politicians. They ran over the people, the defenders of righteousness that I like to think of in the natural resource industries that were providing the products that the consumers of the country wanted and needed. Suddenly we've got an educational system both in the universities

198 and in the public schools that plays every record that they produce. Every record that they record is played there for the kids to get, and we've a whole generation of people brought up to believe that forestry is not essential anymore. After the great job that Pinchot and Greeley and the handful of pioneers in our profession did, Fernow, did in getting the country off its tail into forestry, it's a terrible thing after nearly a century since the start that we're now headed toward a complete stalemate to where anybody who anticipates coming into our profession has got to take about sixteen different looks at it to see whether there's any future, whether he's even going to have a chance for any employment. I still get a lot of young people that come to see me. People refer them to me, companies sometimes, sometimes universities. I take all the time it takes, if I have to spend an hour with a youngster, give him a lead to where I think he might find a job.

That was never in my job description when I was employed by the association, but I always did that for years. I always thought it was one of my jobs to recruit bright, young men for our industry. I really worked hard to help find young men opportunities for employment. I used to get a lot of them. I used to get two or three hundred of them every year. But today, if a kid comes to see him, I say, "If you're interested practicing forestry, don't stay in the Northwest. Go someplace else, because it's not going to be practiced here the way that we envisioned it was going to be much longer. The government's quit. The government is no longer interested in it. The anti-forestry forces are attempting continually through law and regulation to make it impossible to do it on private lands."

Today, for example, in the state of California. I was a registered forester there for a while. I grandfathered in when they started their registration because I thought that I might possibly do some work down there, although I haven't done any for a long time. I did a little down there, but not very much. Most of the work that I've done has either been abroad or it's been in the fir region. Today, I wouldn't recommend anybody to invest any money in trying to practice forestry on private land in California. The regulations of the State Board of Forestry in California have damn near made it impossible. I was getting all those regulations when I was still registered. I let my registration expire a couple years ago. They kept raising the dues. It started out at about thirty dollars a year. I guess when I quit paying it was about fifty-five. It's up to about ninety dollars a year now. I just didn't see that it was worth spending that much money for it, so I let it drop. Next time I get invited by Who's Who to submit my biography, I'll cut out the fact that I'm a registered forester in California, because I am no longer. I still maintain my registration as a logging engineer in Washington and Oregon. I pay my regular dues. I'm old enough to take the retirement thing, but I still pay every year.

But California is impossible now. The regulations that that board has adopted are absolutely impossible. I had some long talks with Jerry Partain after he retired, and he feels the same way. He feels that we've gone so far over the hill there that he says, "There's no way anybody can do it. We're going to make it impossible for them."

HKS: Let's assume that the environmental movement started in 1962 with the publication of Silent Spring; it's a convenient starting point.

WDH: Sure.

199

HKS: So we've had thirty years to observe the increasing level of activity and success in the environmental movement. Was the industry perhaps too slow to take it seriously? If the dues had gone up and you had more money to work with, do you think you could have been more effective in deflecting the environmental movement?

WDH: If we'd spent more money in working with educators in the public schools and universities, I think we could have been more effective than we were. Dealing with the public alone, I don't know. I don't really know. The public is such a hodgepodge of interests that it's very hard to cater to them. I think the biggest failure in our public relations as an industry was that we didn't utilize in our public stock held corporations, our stockholders, our customers, our suppliers, cutting them in on what our problems were. We didn't do very much of that. We overlooked one great big plus that we had that I don't think our national groups, and our local groups couldn't have done it, but our national groups could have. Every community of two hundred or three hundred people or more in the United States has a retail lumber yard in it. There's thirty-five thousand retail lumber yards in the United States. Now, some of them are building supply companies, they don't just sell lumber, but lumber originally, when they started it was the basis of their business. In the Middle West a lot of them were lumber and coal companies. They sold lumber and they sold coal which was bad, because the lumber always looked black because of the coal dust. It used to make it less merchandisable. [chuckles] But the retail lumbermen of the country were well organized. There were the national retail lumber dealers, and then they had local affiliates. The western had a headquarters in Seattle that covered a few states, one down in Arizona, things like that, Texas and so on. I don't think that NFPA ever recognized the political significance of getting these fellows organized in an educational way. To get literature out in those yards for their customers and all that, because we would have reached one hell of a lot of people that way.

At the time when the Kennedy administration was after us on capital gains. I shouldn't say "after us." They probably were. But after capital gains on timber, there was a national meeting. And the NFPA had a three-day seminar, and it was run really by the Forest Industry Committee on Timber Evaluation and Taxation. Bill Condrell and three other guys and I were invited to come in and be the teachers to the witnesses that were going to go before the Ways and Means Committee. It was kind of fun, because we ran a bunch of mock hearings in which we were the members of Congress asking the principals of our industry like, oh, Al Duvall who was the president of Hammermill Paper Company and Karl Bendetsen of Champion.

We had these mock hearings, and I had these principals of these companies cross examined as witnesses and just given holy hell, [both laugh] teaching them how to respond when an adverse congressman was after them and all that sort of thing. The next time that I was a witness for the SAF on it. But we saved it that time.

But at the same time that was going on, to get some support for what we were trying to do there, NFPA arranged for me to go down to the Statler Hotel and make a talk of about twenty minutes to the National Retail Lumber Dealers' Association which was there. And the National Retail Lumber Dealers, when they had an annual meeting in

200 Washington, D.C., they'd have delegates from every single congressional district in the United States. While those guys were there, they had arranged for these guys to go and talk to their own congressmen. So all four hundred and thirty-five members of the House had somebody go and talk to them. My job was to go there and enthuse them about the importance of capital gains to a retail lumber dealer, because it starts out in the forest, and the continuation of supply for them to have something to sell. And I went there and made one of the best extemporaneous talks that I ever made to this bunch. I never knew any of these guys.

The guy who introduced me was a retail lumberman from Arkansas who was a member of Congress. His name was John Paul Hammerschmidt. He was a Republican from Arkansas and a retail lumber dealer at home. But it was a great experience. These guys in the next two days after my talk, they were out talking to every member of Congress. All four hundred and thirty-five members of the House were contacted by those men. Because the matter was before the Ways and Means Committee of the House. They didn't fool with the Senate on it, because it wasn't up there. Of course under the constitutional rules, taxation bills have to originate in the House. So the House Ways and Means Committee was far more important in an issue like this than the Senate Finance Committee would be. We stopped it cold. I give credit, not to what we did as witnesses before the Ways and Means Committee, but to those retail lumber dealers. Most of them didn't know what the hell it was all about, but they went in there and jaw- boned all these guys. [laughs] It was the end of it. That was a very impressive happening to me.

Looking Back at Successes

HKS: We've already sidled in to my last question--your successes. What are you most proud of?

WDH: I'm proud as hell of the fact that I had the privilege of being the youngest and only survivor of the day when the first tree farms in America were certified January 20, 1942. Thirteen of us. I was the kid. I was twenty-six. The rest of them were men in their forties and fifties. Colonel Greeley was there. Warren Tilton was there. Charlie Marston, who was our forester at Eugene was there. Walker Tilly was there; he was our forester later at Eugene. George Gerlinger who was the president of Willamette Valley Lumber Company. Norman Jacobson, the forester for the St. Paul and Tacoma Lumber Company. Bill Vaughn of Coos Bay Logging Company, later sold out to Weyerhaeuser, a man who had his own nursery in the 1930s down in Coos County. The others were George L. Drake, Simpson Logging Co.; E. T. Clark, Pacific Northwest Loggers Association; Clyde S. Martin, Weyerhaeuser's chief forester; Anton. A. Lausmann, Continental Timber Co.; and Edmund Hayes of Row River Lumber Co.

I'm proud also of the fact that on the fifteenth day of September 1941, Warren Tilton sent me to Weyerhaeuser's office in Tacoma and I borrowed a transit from Walter Ryan, who was their chief engineer. We went down to Nisqually with a couple of kids that were lent to us, one by the name of Alan Berg who later was the mayor of Corvallis and the other Roger Burwell who later was the state director of BLM in the state of

201 Washington, from the Clemons Tree Farm to assist me as chainmen as I surveyed the land that we were going to buy for the nursery at Nisqually. We made the survey, and I took the lats and deps up to Weyerhaeuser's office. Warren Tilton came over. He was a logging engineer. We worked out the courses and drew up the plat. The next day he went and bought the property. Before we gave up that property as a bare root nursery, we had grown a hundred and sixty-six million trees there. We started out to say we were going to grow five million trees a year, and everybody said it was eye wash, building a nursery right alongside the main traveled highway in the state. It was partly for public relations, but it was not eye wash. It became a damn serious reforestation program. In 1961 we opened a second nursery at Canby, Oregon. We outgrew the nursery in Nisqually and abandoned it after we had grown a hundred and sixty-six million trees there and started a new nursery named after Colonel Greeley, also near Olympia. Then we started a container nursery on the old Nisqually site.

Then in the early '70s, we bought a property on the Cowlitz River near Toledo, Washington. We started a fourth nursery. By the time I retired, we were growing forty- five million trees a year and had grown a total to that time of a half a billion trees that were used to reforest a million acres. I'm proud of the fact that I was in that thing from the very beginning and participated in it, except for the time I was gone in the war two and a half years, all the time. I was proud also of the fact that at the time that I had retired, we had certified nearly 70 percent of all the private lands in the Douglas-fir region as tree farms, a much higher percentage than in any other region in the country with a possible exception of the redwood region where there never was a lot of private land.

I'm also proud of the fact that the first applied genetics program in the Douglas-fir region was started by the Industrial Forestry Association. In 1954 we hired Jack Duffield. Gordon Marckworth tried to start one at the University of Washington, but nobody thought he had the steam to really carry it through, so we hired Duffield away from the university for which Gordon never forgave me.

HKS: Bob Campbell taught forest genetics after that.

WDH: He worked for us too. He worked for Jack Duffield at Nisqually. But you know the reason we started a genetics program? Because the government had spent all its efforts in forest genetics with the genus Pinus at Placerville which proposition was started by Douglas-fir lumberman James Garfield Eddy of Port Blakely Mill Company way back in 1922. When his income fell to less than a half million dollars a year in 1932, he gave it to the Forest Service. [laughs] He didn't figure he could carry on the Institute of Forest Genetics in Placerville any longer. The reason that Eddy established it in Placerville is because he went to his friend Luther Burbank at Santa Rosa and inquired what he should do. Burbank told him, "You want to use the genus Pinus, because there are so many species there's more chance to play with than there is with some of the other species." But it was interesting to me that a Douglas-fir lumberman financed the development of the Institute of Forest Genetics and that its initial work was in pine.

202 I'm going to tell you a little bit now about how we got into the genetics business. In 1953 Eisenhower appointed Oregon governor Douglas McKay as secretary of the interior. McKay appointed John Farley, who was a former fish and game commissioner of California and who was then working in Portland as a public relations man for Crown-Zellerbach, as the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Prior to his being appointed Farley had been invited and had accepted a speaking engagement before the International Association of Game and Fish Commissioners at Long Beach, California. When he got this appointment, he wasn't able to fulfill that speaking engagement, because he had to go to Washington to be confirmed and whatever he had to do to get started on his new job. So he called me up and says, "I've got this invitation. How would you like to fill it?" I said, "I don't know much about fish and game." He said, "Yeah? You know more about it than you think. The IFA has been making studies of the big game harvest on west coast Tree Farms for a few years, and you've got some data there that would be very interesting to present to these game and fish commissioners, and make a comparison of the amount of game harvest that there is on the private lands in this region as compared with the public lands." So we got data from the Forest Service and from the states of what was coming off state lands in the way of harvest of big game animals like deer, elk, and bear. We had the data on the private lands, because we had been collecting it for several years, because we thought it was an important part of the story to tell the public that our tree farms were doing a lot more than growing trees. We were providing opportunities for recreational hunting and meat for a hell of a lot of people.

I went down and made the speech. I asked my president at the time. I said, "Rather than take the airplane down there, I'd like to drive down there, because I'd like to go to the Institute of Forest Genetics at Placerville on the way back and see what they're doing down there." Because I thought that we were getting about to the point when it was time to interest our industry in wanting to get into the genetics field. He said, "Sure. Go ahead. It costs more money to drive your car down there and more time and all that sort of thing, but go ahead and do it." So I drove to Long Beach. Of course I wanted to go to Long Beach, because I started school as a kid in Long Beach, California. We'd gone there in the early 1920s for my mother's health and my father died there. I lived in Long Beach from 1921 to '26. After my father died, my mother and I went back to Seattle where our home was. Of course I got the rest of my education there. So any time to go to Long Beach just because of my boyhood memories, my boyhood friends and all that, I'd like to do it. I made the speech, went around and visited. I took all the parents of all the kids I started in the first grade with to dinner one night. It was a great experience, because my mother had kept up all those years with those people down there.

On the way back I went to Placerville, saw a lot of things, and when I came home I was very enthusiastic. A fellow by the name of Pete Righter, who was then manager of the Institute, took me around. I spent a whole day there. He took me out and showed me all the kinds of work they're doing. Of course I questioned him. I said, "What about Douglas-fir? It's a great species that grows so widely." "Well," he said, "we've never done anything with it." I said, "It's about time, isn't it, that we started trying to do something with it?" He said, "You bet. On that basis, go back to Thornton Munger's test of strains plantations and see what happened as a result of the strains." I knew about that, because I'd read all that stuff, and I'd talked with Munger about it a lot. Leo Isaac

203 of course was interested in it. He was a close personal friend of mine. I did a lot of work with him. As a matter of fact before the University of Washington published a manuscript of his on the importance of seed sources, he sent it to me to review. I was working for the Powell River Company in B.C. at the time. I worked my can off on that manuscript. I went to the University of British Columbia Library and checked all his references. He had footnotes, literature citations from Danish and Russian literature. And god, he buggered up all his spelling. I went to the library and got all that stuff corrected. I did a hell of a job on his manuscript and sent it to him. I never heard from him, never got any acknowledgement. So a few months later when I was down in Portland, I took him to lunch one day and I says, "Were you mad at me on the criticism of your manuscript?" Meantime it had been published. Marckworth had published it, and I had even received a copy of it. "Well," he said, "I did write you a letter." I said, "I never got a letter." He said, "Let's go." He went to the files. And we lived on 5680 Chancellor Boulevard, Vancouver, B.C., and he had addressed the letter "W. D. Hagenstein, 5680 Chancellor Boulevard, Victoria, B.C." Wrong town.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: So that restored our friendship. And until the day he died we were very close personal friends. [chuckles]

HKS: I knew him just slightly.

WDH: Oh, he was a wonderful man. He was Mr. Douglas-fir. He really was a wonderful guy.

Anyway, I got back from this trip to Placerville and convinced our nursery committee that the time had come for us to get into a genetics program, and I put together an outline of what I thought we ought to start doing. I talked with Duffield and Duffield was interested, so I hired him. We started our program in 1954. We built a facility there at Nisqually. He would have stayed with us except Duffield was typical of some scientists; management was not his strong suit. We developed the second nursery at Canby. He was disappointed I didn't let him go there. I let our nursery superintendent from Nisqually do it. We moved him down there and let him develop the nursery, because he was a farm boy who would pay attention to the economics of it.

Jack Duffield was always interested in teaching, and he had a chance to come to N.C. State at Raleigh and was on the faculty there. He and I are good friends. We never had any real significant differences. Only one. When he first worked for me, I took him on a field trip around the region for a couple of weeks to introduce him to people and show him different stands of timber and show him some of the reforestation that was going on. I showed him a lot of the failures. I showed him some of the successes, because he didn't have much experience in our region to that point. He had only been up at the University of Washington for a year. About the third day in our field trip he said to me one day, "There's something I've got to tell you." And I said, "What's that?" He says, "I'm a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. You're quite conservative. I don't think you'll approve of it." I said, "What the hell's that got to do with it? What you believe in isn't any of my business. That's yours. The only thing that I'm interested in in

204 you is anything that affects your work for us. Your personal beliefs on anything have nothing whatsoever to do with it." He was being generous in one way by telling me that, because he thought I needed to know.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: We got into genetics, and one of the main reasons we were doing it was to have the green-eyed monster show up in the case of the Forest Service to get them off their tail in our region, and we did. By starting our program, they couldn't stand something like that being done privately. They had to be the big cheese on it, so they immediately began to get into it. And we helped them get into it, because we knew that we would never be financed to do a lot of the basic research in the field that they had started to do a little bit with Roy Silen in the experiment station. Then afterward we worked very closely in the development of these seed orchards and the selection of trees all over. Then we grew the trees in our nursery at Nisqually. We had a second nursery at Nisqually for a while just to grow progeny stock for the progeny testing. By the time I retired our industry was spending seven million dollars a year in genetics including the progeny testing. It got to be a big thing. I'm proud that I personally was the one who stimulated it. I'm proud that our nursery committee and our board of directors backed me up. One of the first things we did when we got these fellows interested, we brought Bruce Zobel out there just to talk to us about what they were doing here. We paid him to come and talk to our board.

HKS: What else Bill? You've got a lot to be proud of. Anything else that stands out in your mind that you're glad happened?

WDH: I'm proud that I worked for an organization that never once ever made me do anything that I didn't believe in. I had wonderful professional freedom from the board of directors of the Industrial Forestry Association and prior to that the West Coast Lumbermen's Association. The principals that we had on our board were high-grade men. Oh, we had some differences of opinion on occasion, but never once was I ever gagged in a board meeting when I disagreed with what they were talking about that I couldn't get up and take them on. I did repeatedly, and I never got fired for it. Some people thought I would be sometimes, people who had come around that weren't quite as strong-minded as I was and say, "Bill, you kind of went overboard on that," and that sort of thing. These were your friends that were trying to protect you from what they thought was yourself. People used to say, "How's your board selected? Do you select them?" I'd say, "No, we have a nominating committee, a nominating committee of our principals. We originally elected the board every year. Then we staggered it where we elected men for three years, and we'd elect a third of them for a three-year term. We'd elect one third each year, so you get some continuity and all that sort of thing. Because if you get a complete turnover, it's chaos for an organization.

HKS: Sure.

WDH: So, "Would you recommend them?" I said, "No. I'm there with the nominating committee if they want to ask questions, and I've got a report card of whether these fellows have been participating or not. If we find guys that never come, we drop them

205 off, because we need to have an active board and we need participants. The only suggestion that I ever made in all those years to a nominating committee was that we always should have a minimum of two or three unmitigated sons of bitches on the board to prevent us from becoming a unanimous consent society." We always did. We had guys that were ornery as hell, and who were guys that would nitpick and guys who would throw obstacles and try to prevent the board from doing things continually, but they'd make these men think and they'd make them discuss things fully before we came to a decision on some momentous thing that we were going to take an active part in. And that is the success of that organization. I think it was probably a much more successful organization because of that.

HKS: Define what you mean by "principals." Make sure it's on the record.

WDH: Well, I think a principal is either a man who's an owner of a company or who's a corporate officer of a company.

HKS: But not necessarily a large company.

WDH: No, not necessarily. Principals are the ones that, when they're voting, they're voting their own money or their company's money. The man who's at a level two or three below that might be confident, but he hasn't got the same restraints on his thinking that the principal who is pledging the expenditure of the money has. When any association begins to get more than half of its board members who are not principals, then it gets into trouble. The principals are the ones that really help keep an association strong. I would say that we were always one of the stronger associations in the United States because of that. I guess that comes about because of the kind of leadership that we had. It was a great privilege for a man as young as I to become the head forester of a great industry at only thirty-two years, well thirty-three years less a week old.

I was working with men who were all twenty to twenty-five years older than myself for many years. I didn't work with men my own age very much. I worked with the older men. I was the kid all the time. But they never treated me like a kid. They always treated me like an adult, and I respected these men greatly for that. They gave me much more freedom than any other association man I ever knew. Too many associations had a tendency to have an executive committee or a handful of principals that the executives of the association would deal with exclusively. I never did that. Our decisions were openly arrived at by the full board of directors. All the executive committee, once we organized one, was solely for the purpose of helping me in administrative things between board meetings. But they never set policy. Policy was set by the full board of directors.

Once in a great while, I would take the initiative and go off and do things that we hadn't really discussed fully. I would check always with our president when I did that. Then I would take our president's judgment on it, and I never got into trouble. I never had a president that ever got me in trouble by letting me do something that I shouldn't have done. I got lots of hell. Weyerhaeuser once in a while, when I would do something publicly, Weyerhaeuser would have me come up and I would meet with them. Oh god, those were awful sessions. But I took them on when they were wrong, and I never got

206 fired for it. There were a few times when it looked as though I might be, because I had been pretty obstreperous about something.

I was outspoken. I always spoke my mind in public. I didn't pussy foot, never. I never walked softly and carried a big stick. I walked with my caulk shoes on and if the stick were needed, I used it. I made some enemies among some of the people who worked for some of the companies in that way. But when the chips were down, had they ever tried to run me off, I always had the votes from the board. I always had the votes. Bingham was one of my problems for a long time, and yet bless his heart, he's the guy that insisted that the board raise my salary substantially in the last four or five years I worked there so that I'd end up with a substantial retirement by my standards. I owe that to Charley Bingham. Nobody else ever paid much attention to association salaries, and I never talked to him or anyone about money. There was a period once when I worked for five years without a five dollar a month raise. For five years! They just forgot about it. And yet when they became generous, they became so generous I was embarrassed by it. [laughs]

HKS: One of the problems is what is an equitable salary for an association executive? What do you compare to?

WDH: Oh, I know. It's very difficult. Except for the last four or five years, I never had a very good salary, but I had all I needed to live the way I wanted to live. And what's more in life? As Ruth told me when we were forty, when G. P. was proselyting me for twice the salary, she says, "When you've got everything you've got and make enough to live the way you want to live at forty years of age, you're a millionaire. Recognize it. Recognize it." [chuckles]

HKS: Maybe that's a good place to stop.

207